EPC Contractor, India, India
Payment released on schedule. Zero traceability gaps at inspection.
180,000
MTRs Processed
400+
Global Mills
247
Traceability Gaps Found
On Schedule
Payment Released
An EPC contractor in India needed 100% material traceability across 180,000 mill certificates from 400 global mills before the asset owner's inspector would release final payment. The QA team was manually keying data at 15 minutes per certificate.
180,000 mill test records across 400 different global mills, no standard format, no consistent layout.
QA team manually keying data at 15 minutes per certificate. At that rate, the register would take over 18 months to build.
The asset owner's inspector required 100% traceability: every spool item matched to its MTR with heat number, chemical composition, and mechanical test results.
Final payment release was conditional on passing the traceability review. Any gap would delay payment.
Ingested all 180,000 MTRs regardless of mill, format, or layout, PDFs, scans, and digital certificates.
Our models extracted heat number, chemical composition, mechanical test results, and material grade from every certificate.
Structured the extracted data and matched it against PO line items and spool item numbers.
Produced a comprehensive gap report: 247 spool items with no MTR on file, with specific PO references and expected mill sources.
The client's QA team used the gap report to request missing certificates from mills before the inspector arrived.
Delivered the complete traceability register in a format ready for the owner's review.
All 180,000 MTRs processed and structured, regardless of mill format or layout.
Heat numbers, chemical compositions, and mechanical test results matched against PO line items.
247 traceability gaps identified, spool items with no MTR on file, with specific references for resolution.
Client resolved all gaps before the inspector arrived.
Final payment released on schedule, no delays, no disputes.
The gap report that would have taken a QA team a month was delivered in two weeks.
“We would have spent three months building this manually and still had gaps. Pathnovo gave us the gap report in two weeks that would have taken a QA team a month to produce.”
QMQA Manager
EPC Contractor, India
Documents Processed
Mill Test Records (180,000)
Purchase Orders
Spool Tracking Sheets
Capabilities Used
Target System
Material Traceability Register
Pathnovo's MTR extraction models are trained on a corpus covering 400+ global mill formats: Indian PSU mills (SAIL, JSW, Tata Steel, Jindal), Korean mills (POSCO, Hyundai Steel), Japanese mills (Nippon Steel, JFE), European mills (ArcelorMittal, Salzgitter, voestalpine), and US mills (Nucor, US Steel), plus boutique mills supplying specialty alloys. The model extracts heat number, chemical composition, mechanical test results, and material grade regardless of layout, language (where applicable), or whether the certificate is a clean PDF, a scan, or a faxed copy.
The asset owner's inspector required 100% traceability per spool item: every weld point matched to a mill certificate with heat number, chemistry, and mechanical results. Any gap meant the inspector would withhold sign-off, and sign-off was the contractual gate for final payment release. 247 missing certificates at 0.14% of total volume would still have triggered a complete payment hold, not a pro-rata release.
Pathnovo's gap report listed each missing certificate with its specific PO reference, expected mill source, and heat number range (derived from adjacent matched certificates). The client's QA team used this to issue targeted re-request emails to the mills, who returned the missing certificates within 2 to 3 weeks. Without the structured gap report, the QA team would have spent 4 to 6 weeks identifying what was missing before they could even start chasing it.
A QA analyst manually opens each certificate, identifies the heat number, transcribes chemical composition (typically 10 to 14 elements), transcribes mechanical test results (yield, tensile, elongation, impact), looks up the corresponding PO line item, and writes the record into the traceability spreadsheet. 15 minutes is a realistic median for clean PDFs. Scanned certificates and certificates with handwritten notations run longer. 180,000 certificates at 15 minutes each is 45,000 hours, roughly 18 months of full-time work for a single analyst.
Yes. The structured register persists as a queryable database tied to PO line items and spool numbers, so subsequent inspections (Chief Inspector of Boilers under IBR for in-service equipment, classification society surveys, periodic API 510 / 570 inspections) reference the same register without re-extraction. The client's QA team adds new certificates incrementally as they arrive for future scope; Pathnovo's pipeline ingests them in the same structured format.
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