Recently enhanced Level I and Level II trainings provide the opportunity for a growing number of NDE service provider technicians to independently perform successful pipeline material verification and testing without MMT supervision.
Several companies using MMT’s HSD Tester and MMTConnect™ software have been able to successfully and independently collect accurate and verifiable material verification data after completing MMT’s rigorous HSD Training and Certification Program.
Currently, there are 4 NDE service providers with technicians that have successfully completed Level II training. There are an additional 20 NDE service providers and over 50 technicians at various stages in the Level I training. Through these training programs, technicians receive the skills required to operate the HSD Tester, collect material verification data, and verify the quality of that data for submission to the reporting team.
Built into MMT’s training program are several checkpoints that test the competencies of the trained technicians. Recent updates have made the training program more rigorous and added more quantifiable methods for measuring technicians’ competencies.
In the Level I trainings, composed of both classroom training time and hands-on in-ditch evaluations, technicians become familiar with the key fundamentals of data collection, the data collection procedures, and the HSD tester and troubleshooting procedures. Once a technician has progressed through all sub-levels of the Level I trainings, and has completed an in-field audit, technicians can then move to Level II training, and focus more on learning the HSD tester and data collection itself. In the Level II training, technicians learn the components and sensors that make up the HSD tester, diagnostic techniques, and learn to understand and interpret data on a more complex level.
Parth Patel, HSD Subject Matter Expert and Technical Operations Manager at MMT, oversees the HSD Training and Certification Program. His main goal is to empower technicians to report accurate and reliable material verification data.
He said, “Our end goal is to allow a technician at any company to be as successful as one of our technicians in using the HSD 8000 and MMTConnect system. We want to allow any company to deliver the necessary data to an operator successfully, ultimately leading to safer pipeline operations.”
This article appeared in News & Views: MMT’s Q3 Newsletter. Subscribe today to receive these quarterly newsletters straight to your inbox.
