EASL's 2016 in review

POSTED 30.12.16

EASL’s 2016 in review

As 2016 draws to a close, Managing Director Antony Hurst takes a look back at the work and the team that has made up EASL. Furthermore, with fond farewells to long-serving members of staff and welcoming new members of the EASL team, we’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone at EASL for their hard work and dedication in 2016 and for organisations we’ve had the pleasure to work with.

Our work in 2016

This year we issued 53 technical reports, 44 in our own livery and 9 in clients’ livery.  We also assisted with the publication of 3 further technical reports, by verifying reports in our clients’ livery.

Our work continues to come mainly from EDF Energy Nuclear Generation but we have also done work for NNB GenCo HPC, Rolls-Royce Power Engineering and Hosokawa Micron during this year.

We provided on-site support for assessments of flow accelerated corrosion to statutory outages at three UK nuclear power stations.  For the latter two, following a cost-saving initiative proposed by EASL, we successfully removed the requirement for pre-outage assessment work, thereby saving the client over £80,000.

We conducted 15 on-site surveys of the pipework supports for the steam and feed systems at five UK nuclear power stations, involving the survey and/or audit of over 12,000 individual pipework supports and making recommendations for remedial works where required.

Quality Systems

The quality system continues to improve under the leadership of Louis Chang and Tom Hurst.  To continue our improvement, we raised over one hundred lessons learnt (LL), suggestions for improvement (SFI) and non-conformances (NC) mostly raised on ourselves.

There were twelve NCs including three errors relating to technical issues in issued deliverables.  We managed two external audits, including the focus visit by LRQA which involved planning to develop the system to meet ISO 9001:2015.  We should be proud of the high quality work we do, as all external auditors have commented.

New Staff and Retirements

Technical Director, Eric Sinclair retired in March 2016 after nearly 15 years’ service at EASL.  We wish Eric a long and happy retirement.

We recruited two new Graduates, Dipankar Das currently writing up his PhD from City University, London and Dan Cass from Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU).  Additionally, Amy Saunders returned to MMU after completing her placement year and was replaced by Ross Taylor, also of MMU.  Amy will maintain her links with EASL during the final year of her studies as she completes a project based on work she started whilst on placement.

Additional Accreditation

Our staff demonstrate their expertise by seeking accreditation in various structural integrity roles to achieve Suitably Qualified and Experienced Person status. Collectively our staff achieved ten new SQEP accreditations in 2016.

The Year Ahead

Throughout its 28 year history EASL has grown organically by building a strong reputation for excellent service and winning new clients through word of mouth from satisfied customers.

We now believe our people and our systems are in a great place to enable the company to expand more rapidly in the future.  In addition to this, we worked closely with Knutsford-based creative agency Ultimate to elevate the EASL brand, develop a new website and help us bring our brand of ‘Stress-free structural integrity’ to new customers and new industries.

2017 is already set to be a busy year with significant time already committed to tasks with EDF Energy NG including on-site support to statutory outages at five UK nuclear power stations.  Besides we are also providing an embedded contractor to the Structural Integrity Team leading the HPC project throughout the whole of 2017.

Antony Hurst, 28^th December 2016