How It Works | Fifteen54

This Is What Fabricators Deal With Daily

Material certificates arrive in every state imaginable: degraded scans, rotated pages, handwritten annotations, squashed into sidebars to fit additional tracking data. Critical information becomes nearly impossible to find.

Example certificate - degraded scan with highlighting

Manual highlighting to track heat numbers

Example certificate - multiple products, dense data

Dense data across multiple product lines

Example certificate - rotated orientation

Rotated orientation from scanning

These certificates get compiled into a Manufactured Documentation Record (MDR). Now imagine checking thousands of these for compliance at project handover. What a headache.

Fabricators do their best. But the reality is they're dealing with these documents daily, in large volumes. Sometimes certificates arrive late. Sometimes packs are incomplete. Among a busy production schedule, somehow each certificate is supposed to be verified for compliance.

What Actually Needs To Be Checked?

For starters: what standard is the product manufactured to?

The AS1074 Trap

How many would know that AS1074 doesn't qualify to AS1554.1? Pipe manufactured to AS1074 is general purpose, non-structural pipe—used for water pipe or general purposes. It is not designed for structural applications. Yet it appears on certificates all the time.

Is the steel grade correct? (e.g., engineer specifies RHS Grade 450)

Does the standard comply with structural requirements?

Are the mechanical properties within specification?

Is the heat number actually a heat number—or a pack number?

Has the certificate been modified from the original?

Try It Yourself

Look at the example certificates above. How quickly can you verify the grade, standard, and heat numbers against project requirements? Now multiply that by hundreds of certificates.

How It Gets Worse

Suppliers sometimes confuse heat numbers with pack numbers or group numbers. Manually entered heat numbers contain typos. Different companies have different systems to cope.

Some manually match inventory to certificates, marking with pen and highlighter, then scanning the result. Others add side tabs with additional data—squashing the original certificate, making it difficult to read, sometimes rotating it sideways or upside down.

By the time it reaches project handover, the documentation is an amateur-looking mess. It doesn't matter how hard the quality manager tries: start with garbage, end up with garbage.

The Result

The final MDR is lucky if it's complete, nearly impossible to verify as correct, and even harder to audit. Asset owners receive documentation they can't trust. The industry knows it's a problem—but until now, there hasn't been a better way.

What We're Building

Certified documents from the original source—the mill or accredited laboratory—stored in a repository with critical information preserved and indexed.

The Result: A Professional MDR Pack

Cover page with document index

Compliance summary - verified

Clean delivery docket

Properly formatted certificate

From Chaos to Clarity

Every document indexed, every heat number verified, every compliance requirement checked. Generated automatically from original source certificates—not degraded scans passed through the supply chain.

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Original Source Documents

Certificates captured directly from mills and laboratories, before degradation through the supply chain.

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Supply Chain Traceability

Each link in the chain can access and reference certificates, documenting what material and heat numbers they handled.

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Generated MDR Packs

Fabricators receive documentation packs generated from original certificates, matched to the products used on each job.

✓

Verified Records

Asset owners receive indexed, clean, and verifiable records of exactly what's contained in their structure.

The Problem With Material Certificates