National Technical Systems, Inc. (NTS), the leader in testing, inspection, and certification, today announced that its Nuclear Center of Excellence located in Huntsville, Alabama earned IEEE’s Conformity Assessment Program (ICAP) Certification. The ICAP certification permits NTS to connect directly to manufacturers through a standard of product qualification testing and standardized reporting. As a result, NTS will be able to streamline the approval process for customers worldwide.
ICAP certification is important for expediting market adoption while reducing implementation costs. The program is specifically designed to ensure product conformity to IEEE standards, thus reducing testing burdens on manufacturers that need to meet multiple programs for different end-users or buyers. ICAP also enables trade across state and international boundaries with the assurance of operating safely and reliably within certain measurable performance criteria.
“We will be able to achieve new levels of efficiencies for our utility customers through reporting alone,” said Tom Boonarkat, Manager of NTS Nuclear Operations. “With direct uploads into the utility’s Equipment Qualification database, the reporting format will ease roughly 70 percent of the burden needed to incorporate results at the back end,” he continued. The efficiency of the qualification process on the front end will be similarly improved by adopting a common standard for preparing the qualification test plan.
Labs are audited regularly to achieve a certification rating. As part of the certification process, NTS’s Nuclear Center of Excellence earned the highest rating under the ICAP program—a three-star designation. “The ICAP rating puts NTS into an exclusive club of premier qualification testing labs,” according to Boonarkat. “There are only two other labs in the world that hold this status.”
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