Contracts and specifications

This chapter is concerned with contracts and specifications in engineering and the way in which the plant engineer should approach them. 

Contracts and Specifications. A contract is a legal document that specifies the responsibilities of both the contractor who dehvers the service and the owner who receives the service. Specifications are also legal documents that the contractor must follow throughout the project. Specifications are often based on well-developed construction practices but sometimes may include special requirements added by the owner. These legal documents are developed, negotiated, and decided upon between the contractor and the owner. 

Mobley, K., ed. 2001. Plant Engineer s Handbook. Boston BnOerworth-Heinanann. This reference is concerned with industrial operations or maintenance. Coverage includes the basics of plant engineering, layout and location, contracts and specifications, energy and water supply, HVAC, safety and health, maintenance, mechanical and electrical equipment, and statistical applications. 

Sugar trading is controlled by contractual agreements between buyers and sellers. The contracts set specifications and limits and detail the required tests that must be conducted. In the United States, three parties participate in the analyses of raw sugar the buyer, the seller, and the New York Sugar Trade Laboratory (NYSTL). The settiement value for polarization is determined as the average of the two closest results if all three results are equidistant, all three results are averaged. 

Table 10-56 gives values for the modulus of elasticity for nonmetals however, no specific stress-limiting criteria or methods of stress analysis are presented. Stress-strain behavior of most nonmetals differs considerably from that of metals and is less well-defined for mathematic analysis. The piping system should be designed and laid out so that flexural stresses resulting from displacement due to expansion, contraction, and other movement are minimized. This concept requires special attention to supports, terminals, and other restraints. 

In drawing contracts and making acceptance tests, refer to the pertinent ASTM standards. ASTM Standards contain specifications (classifications) and test methods for burner fuels (D 396), motor and aviation gasolines (D 4814 and D 910), diesel fuels (D 975), and avia-... 

Health and safety issues and worker protection should be integrated into project specifications, bid packages, contracts, and other appro-... 

This is important information that describes the site and provides workers, visitors, and other personnel with pertinent site information. In addition to studying job specifications, contracts, and talking with project management, the author(s) should develop a detailed operating history of the site. The history is useful when determining potential site hazards. The type of information that can typically be located includes ... 

Delivery decisions are more than decisions about conformance to specification. They are about conformance to contract and those responsible for the production processes may not be able to determine whether contractual conditions have been met. Much more may hang on the resolution of a problem than mere conformance to specification. The decision in some circumstances may be taken by the CEO. There may have been a safety problem or a product liability problem so your system needs to recognize these fine distinctions. Those making the delivery decisions need possession of all the information required to protect the company as well as meet customer needs. 

There are two types of resource requirements those needed to run the business and those needed to execute particular contracts or sales. The standard is not specific, but a glance at ISO 9004-1 will reveal that it is more than those needed for a particular contract and less than needed to run the business. ISO 9004-1 limits the resources to those needed to implement the quality policy and meet quality objectives. It will be very difficult for companies to distinguish between those resources which serve quality and those which serve other objectives. There may be some departments that can be eliminated, such as the legal, insurance, catering, medical, or publicity departments, but in a company-wide quality culture all departments etc. will be included. 

You should review the contract and the detail specifications to identify whether your existing controls will regulate quality within the limits required. You may need to change the limits, the standards, the techniques, the methods, the environment, and the instruments used to measure quality characteristics. One technique may be to introduce Just-in-time as a means of overcoming storage problems and eliminating receipt inspection. Another technique may be Statistical Process Control as a means of increasing the process yield. The introduction of these techniques needs to be planned and carefully implemented. 

There are two types of external documents, those in the public domain and those produced by specific customers. In some cases the issues of both types of documents are stated in the contract and therefore it is important to ensure that you possess the correct version before you commence work. Where the customer specifies the issue status of public domain documents that apply you need a means of preventing their withdrawal from use in the event that they are revised during the term of the contract. Where the issue status of public domain documents is not specified you may either have a free choice as to the issue you use or, as is more likely, you may need to use the latest issue in force. Where this is the case you will need a means of being informed when such documents are revised to ensure that you can obtain the latest version. The ISO 9000 series for instance is reviewed every five years, so could well be revised at five-year intervals. With national and international legislation the situation is rather different as these can change at any time. You need some means of alerting yourself to changes that affect you and there are several methods from which to choose ... 

The document availability requirement applies to both internal and external documents alike. Customer documents such as contracts, drawings, specifications, and standards need to be available to those who need them to execute their responsibilities. Often these documents are only held in paper form and therefore distribution lists will be needed to control their location. If documents in the public domain are required, they only need be available when required for use and need not be available from the moment they are specified in a specification or procedure. You should only have to produce such documents when they are needed for the work being undertaken at the time of the audit. However, you would need to demonstrate that you could obtain timely access when needed. If you provide a lending service to users of copyrighted documents, you would need a register indicating to whom they were loaned so that you can retrieve them when needed by others. 

Customer engineering standards and specifications are external documents. Therefore your procedure for controlling external documents should also cover these documents. Where ISO/TS 16949 differs from ISO 9001 on this topic is that ISO 9001 does not require external documents to be reviewed or implemented. However, any external document received or procured for the organization should be reviewed for its applicability before it is brought under control, otherwise resources could be wasted on controlling documents that have no practical use in the organization. This requirement could be placed under Contract rev/ew since any documents issued by customers form part of the contract and should go through contract review before acceptance and implementation. 

If a quality record was intended to be any document generated or used by the quality system, the definition would surely have indicated this. If we decompose the definition further, requirements for quality are defined in ISO 8402 as the expression of the needs or their translation into a set of quantitatively stated requirements for the characteristics of an entity to enable its realization and examination. Clearly, such a requirement would be a contract, product specification, design requirement, etc. This implies that any product verification records are quality records, but it rules out any recorded information as being a quality record. 

Mammals, fungi, and higher plants produce a family of proteolytic enzymes known as aspartic proteases. These enzymes are active at acidic (or sometimes neutral) pH, and each possesses two aspartic acid residues at the active site. Aspartic proteases carry out a variety of functions (Table 16.3), including digestion pepsin and ehymosin), lysosomal protein degradation eathepsin D and E), and regulation of blood pressure renin is an aspartic protease involved in the production of an otensin, a hormone that stimulates smooth muscle contraction and reduces excretion of salts and fluid). The aspartic proteases display a variety of substrate specificities, but normally they are most active in the cleavage of peptide bonds between two hydrophobic amino acid residues. The preferred substrates of pepsin, for example, contain aromatic residues on both sides of the peptide bond to be cleaved. 

Most standard forms of contract contain specific procedures for determination, and these should be rigidly adhered to. For example, the contract document may lay down that the contractor be given 14 days notice in writing to rectify his progress before determination is carried out. Any letters should be sent by recorded delivery or served by hand. While liquidated or non-liquidated damages can be claimed with respect to late or incomplete work, expense claims usually follow the events shown below, which are also mentioned in Section 8.24 ... 

Dihydropyridine receptor (DHPR) is a member of voltage-dqiendent Ca2+ channels (CaVi, L-type), which specifically binds to dihydropyridine derivatives, a group of the Ca2+ channel blockers. Cav 1.1 works as the voltage sensor for skeletal muscle contraction, and Cay 1.2, as Ca2+-influx channel for cardiac muscle contraction. 

---