Recovery plan when the qualified welders, not the welders, are the bottleneck

Do the arithmetic before promising anything. 250 spools × 2 girth welds = 500 welds; over 10 weeks and 5 days that is 10 welds per day. The shop is producing 9 per day, so it is already about 10% short - and that is with 12 welders on the books. The real constraint is qualification, not headcount. Only three welders hold GTAW root plus SMAW fill, and one has not welded the process for five months; under ISO 9606-1 the employer's six-month confirmation is invalid, so that certificate cannot be relied on. Another expires in four weeks. The effective qualified pool is therefore one or two welders, not three, and the other nine cannot legally weld these joints to the WPS. That explains why adding welders to the shift would add nothing. The plan must start with requalification: test the lapsed welder, renew the expiring certificate, and cross-qualify four or five of the other welders with a 6-inch Sch 80 test in the same position, if their existing qualifications allow extension. Until that is done, the output figure is a capacity ceiling, not a target.

A jump from 3% to 9% in two weeks is a signal, not noise. Use a structured comparison: stratify the repair records by welder, by root/fill/cap, by position and by consumable batch, and compare week 1 with week 3. Two changes are already known: the gas supplier and the new E7018 batch stored in an open, unheated store. Moisture pickup in basic electrodes is a classic cause of porosity and hydrogen cracking, so check the batch certificates, the storage history, and bake or quarantine the electrodes. Check the gas purity certificate and the flow rates at the torch, because a change of supplier is only harmless if the specification is met. Then check whether the repairs are concentrated in the newly qualified welders: a 9% rate in two welders points to technique, not consumables. Do not change everything at once: change one variable, hold the rest, and measure again. Add a daily repair-rate chart and a weld log recording welder ID and consumable batch, so the next excursion can be attributed rather than guessed.

Recovery has to be built on qualified capacity. Qualify five or six welders over the first two to three weeks, and in the meantime bring in two or three qualified welders from another site or a subcontractor, with certificates verified before they start. Add a second shift rather than pushing overtime, because fatigue shows up in the repair rate. Split the work: GTAW root and hot pass at one station, fill and cap at another, so the qualified GTAW welders stop being the bottleneck. Set a daily target of 11–12 welds to recover the deficit and track it against the 10-per-day average. Protect quality while doing this: quarantine the suspect electrodes, re-test the gas, and re-check the first 20 welds after each change before releasing the rest. Tell the client the truth - the original plan was never achievable with three qualified welders - and agree a revised milestone based on the extra qualified welders. Review at the end of week 5 against the 50-weld weekly target, and adjust the subcontractor numbers then.