Schedule Q Inspection and Test Plans: hold, witness and review points

If you read only one thing about Schedule Q, make it this: the Inspection and Test Plan is where the money is. The quality manual is a document somebody writes once and files. The ITP is a live instrument that decides, activity by activity, when work may proceed and when it must stop — and getting one line of it wrong can mean opening up completed work and doing it again.

This article is about how that mechanism works and how to write an ITP that survives contact with a real project. For what Schedule Q is in general — and for the widespread and expensive misconception that it is a safety schedule — see our supplier's guide to Schedule Q.

What an ITP actually is

Saudi Aramco's engineering procedure for inspection coverage, SAEP-1150, describes an Inspection and Test Plan as a document built on the detailed manufacturing, fabrication and construction programme. It identifies each process, sets out the sequence of activities to be inspected, examined and tested, and lists the approved procedures that govern them.

In practice that means an ITP is a table with one row per activity, and each row answers six questions:

Column	The question it answers
Activity	What is being done
Reference procedure	Under what written procedure
Acceptance criteria	Against what measurable standard it passes
Verifying document	What record proves it happened
Responsibility	Who performs and who verifies
Intervention point	What each party does — H, W or R

The last column is the one that has teeth.

The three intervention points

These three letters are the whole mechanism, and they are routinely misunderstood by people who have been working to them for years.

Point	What it obliges	What happens if the party does not attend
Hold (H)	Work stops at this point and may not proceed until the nominated party attends and releases it	Work stays stopped. Proceeding without release is a non-conformance regardless of the result
Witness (W)	The party is notified and invited to attend	Work may proceed after the notice period expires
Review (R)	A documentation check after the fact, not a physical attendance	The document is reviewed later; no site interruption

The distinction between hold and witness is the one that costs money. A witness point that is missed is an administrative matter. A hold point that is passed without release is a different category of problem, because no amount of subsequent test evidence substitutes for the release that was not obtained. A weld that passed every NDT test it was later given can still be a non-conformance if the fit-up hold point was never released, and the remedy can be to cut it out.

Why notification periods matter more than they look

A witness point only converts into "may proceed" once notice was properly given. That means the notification period in the contract is not a courtesy — it is what makes proceeding lawful. Two practical consequences:

• Notify in the contractual manner, not the convenient one. A verbal heads-up to an inspector who happens to be on site is not notice. Whatever the contract says — written, a set number of working hours, through a named channel — is what protects you.
• Record the notification, not just the inspection. The evidence that matters later is that notice was given and the period elapsed. If the only record is of the work itself, you cannot demonstrate the point was properly passed.

Who signs each column

An ITP typically carries a column per party — Contractor, Subcontractor, Vendor, Third Party, and Saudi Aramco — and each gets its own letter on each row. The same activity can be a hold point for one party and a review point for another.

This is where ITPs most often go wrong at the drafting stage: a row is given a single intervention level as though it applied to everybody. It does not. Draft each row as a set of independent obligations.

The five failure modes

Most ITP problems are one of these.

1. Hold points nobody can service. An ITP with forty hold points on a fast-moving activity will not be honoured, because the inspection resource to release them does not exist. The result is either sustained delay or, more commonly, hold points quietly passed without release — which converts a planning error into a documented non-conformance. Put hold points where the work becomes unverifiable afterwards, and use review points elsewhere.

2. Acceptance criteria that are not criteria. "To be inspected and found satisfactory" is not an acceptance criterion. A criterion states a measurable limit and the document it comes from. If the row cannot be failed objectively, it cannot be passed objectively either.

3. Points placed after the evidence disappears. The test of a good hold point is simple: after this activity, can the thing being verified still be seen? Fit-up before welding, cleanliness before coating, reinforcement before pour, backfill before covering. Once the next operation runs, the evidence is gone.

4. The vendor's ITP not linked to yours. Material arriving from a vendor comes with its own inspection regime, and if your ITP does not reference it, you have a gap exactly where the boundary is. See the next section.

5. Revisions that outrun approval. An ITP is normally submitted for approval and then followed. A site that has moved on to revision 4 while revision 2 is the approved copy has a problem that surfaces at audit rather than at the point of work.

Where suppliers enter the picture

This is the part most equipment vendors never think about, and it is worth saying plainly: if you sell into an Aramco contract, you are inside somebody else's ITP whether or not you signed anything with Aramco.

The contractor's quality plan is required to ensure that subcontractor and vendor activities are planned, coordinated and completed in compliance with contract requirements. Concretely, your delivery becomes evidence in their plan:

• Your material certificates are the verifying document on their incoming inspection row.
• Your heat numbers and traceability are what let a delivered item be tied back to a certificate at audit.
• Your test reports — pressure, NDT, functional, calibration — are review point documents.
• If your works testing carries a witness or hold point, your factory schedule sits inside the project inspection schedule, and slipping it without notice breaks their plan, not just yours.

The single most useful thing a buyer can do is state the certification requirement at enquiry stage rather than at delivery. An EN 10204 type 3.1 certificate has to be produced by the manufacturer at the time of manufacture, against the actual material supplied. It cannot be conjured afterwards for material that has already shipped on a type 2.2 report. Discovering the mismatch at incoming inspection means the material is rejected and the lead time restarts.

A worked row

Here is what one good ITP row looks like, for a pressure-containing spool.

Field	Entry
Activity	Hydrostatic test of fabricated spool
Reference procedure	Contractor pressure testing procedure, revision as approved
Acceptance criteria	Test pressure and hold duration per the approved test package; no visible leakage, no permanent deformation
Verifying document	Signed test record with calibrated gauge ID and chart
Contractor	H
Third party	W
Saudi Aramco	W
Notes	Gauge calibration certificate available at the test; gauge range selected so the test pressure sits mid-scale

Note the last line. A hydrostatic test read on a gauge working at the top of its scale is a test whose number nobody should rely on — which is why gauge range selection belongs in the ITP row rather than in somebody's memory. The same thinking applies to every instrument that produces an acceptance number.

What to do this week

If you are preparing for an Aramco contract and want the ITP to be an asset rather than a liability:

1. Count your hold points and divide by your inspection resource. If the number is not serviceable, redesign before submission, not during execution.
2. Read every acceptance criterion and ask whether it could be failed. Rewrite the ones that could not.
3. Walk the sequence and mark where evidence disappears. Those positions are your real hold points.
4. List every bought-in item that carries a certificate, and put the certificate type into the purchase enquiry — not the purchase order, the enquiry, so that it is priced.
5. Fix your notification route, and keep the record of notice alongside the record of inspection.

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A note on sources. Copies of Schedule Q circulating online are unofficial and some are demonstrably old. Everything above describes the mechanism, which is stable, rather than specific clause numbers or submission periods, which are not. Verify every number against the contract you actually signed.

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NIFAL (MNT) supplies safety and industrial equipment into contracts working to Saudi Aramco requirements, from Dammam. If you need material with certification that will survive incoming inspection, state the certificate type with the enquiry and we will price it properly.