AASHTO re:source Q & A Podcast

Common Findings in Concrete Assessments - ASTM C1077

• AASHTO resource • Season 4 • Episode 26

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AASHTO re:source Q&A Podcast Transcript

Season 4, Episode 26: Common Findings in Concrete Assessments - C1077

Recorded: October 25, 2023

Released: November 21, 2023

Hosts: Brian Johnson, AASHTO Accreditation Program Director, AASHTO resource; Kim Swanson, Communications Manager, AASHTO re:source 

Note: Please reference AASHTO re:source and AASHTO Accreditation Program policies and procedures online for official guidance on this, and other topics. 

Transcription is auto-generated. 

[Theme music fades in.] 

00:00:02 ANNOUNCER: Welcome to AASHTO resource Q & A. We're taking time to discuss construction materials testing and inspection with people in the know.  From exploring testing problems and solutions to laboratory best practices and quality management, we're covering topics important to you. Now here’s our host, Brian Johnson.

00:00:21 BRIAN: Welcome to AASHTO Resource Q&A. I'm Brian Johnson.

00:00:25 KIM: And I'm Kim Swanson.

00:00:26 BRIAN: Few weeks ago, we had a post on our social media polling people about what they would like to hear on future episodes of the podcast.

00:00:35 KIM: And the question was what type of episodes do you want to hear from us in the future? The options were test method or nonconformity-related, laboratory safety, soft skills or things about other AASHTO programs.

00:00:50 BRIAN: OK, So what was the top?

00:00:51 KIM: Top rating unsurprising to me was test method and nonconformity-related episodes. So that's what we're doing here today.

00:01:00 BRIAN: Well, we can do that. So, the timing couldn't be better because just recently I was asked to give a presentation at a regional laboratory meeting in our area. Where they had asked me to present on different AASHTO Accreditation and AASHTO resource issues. Including common nonconformities put together a list of the top concrete related nonconformities and I went over that and then just this week. So that was last week. This week we had a very similar meeting with one of the DOT's where they wanted us to go over common findings for a few of the common scopes of testing, so we did that just yesterday and there was a lot of good discussion and it sounds like people were really interested in hearing what kind of mistakes people were making in concrete tests. So we are going to do that right now, but one thing I want to preface it with is these are common findings. That does not mean that everybody has these in their reports, but when people do make mistakes in concrete testing, it's usually these ones. These are the most common ones and we can play a little game.

00:02:11 BRIAN: At home, we'll let you think about these things as you're listening to what we're saying and as I bring up a topic, you can think, oh, what do I think the most common one is? And then you'll get to hear it. So it's like your very own family feud episode that you're having in your car while you're listening to this.

00:02:28 KIM: You're assuming people are in their car, but that's the fair assumption I think. And you know what? I'm going to play along and I'm just going to guess with no technical experience, just might know how I'm going to guess what the top nonconformity is for the specific thing and we're going to see how that goes.

00:02:43 BRIAN: That will certainly make things interesting, because you may not have any idea about any of these things.

00:02:44 KIM: It will. I will guarantee I have no idea about any of it, but I want to play.  I like games.

00:02:53 BRIAN: OK. So it's really going to be like the Family Feud then?

00:02:56 KIM: Yes. So I think we're going to be doing a series of these episodes, like you said, going over the common findings or nonconformities for the common concrete standards. What do we have for today's episode?

00:03:09 BRIAN: Alright, so in general. Before we get into specifics, I want to mention if you are setting up a lab and you'd like to avoid nonconformities, these are the general topics that keep coming up. #1 is facilities specifically curing facilities, is what goes wrong. So laboratories move more than you'd think into different buildings and sometimes they don't have an understanding.  For their landlord, there's not an agreement about what has to happen at this laboratory, so one of the things that has to happen is they have to have a curing facility that is not connected to the outside of the building, so they can't use one of the walls as one of the curing room walls. So they kind of have to build a room within the building that is going to have water in it and it's going to be a very busy place that requires power and water and other things. So when you're moving into a new laboratory, it's important to make sure that that is going to accommodate. A proper curing facility or you are going to be getting very common findings about not having proper curing facilities.

00:04:16 KIM: Am I thinking of moist rooms or curing facilities when it comes to like people use a walk-in refrigerator sometimes for that?

00:04:22 BRIAN: Same thing. Yeah. There are a lot of ways that curing can be accomplished. There are requirements, but it's not like you just you can go out and buy a curing room that's already built. But most people don't want to spend the money.

00:04:23 KIM: OK.

00:04:36 BRIAN: They need to do that so they kind of they try to figure out a way to engineer a curing facility that's going to work for them. Plus, everybody's got different workloads. So if you've got a really heavy workload of concrete cylinders being tested in your lab, you're going to need a really big facility. And there might not be one that's going to accommodate that. And if you have a really small.  One you might not need them as big as what you can buy, but I think most of the time it just comes down to people who don't want to spend the money. So facility is a big one. Equipment in general is a big one. You know things are out of spec or not being maintained properly personnel certifications, is there another one or you know, people aren't trained or they're having performance problems and then the other one, that's probably everybody. I mean this most common for everybody in every lab is some issue with the quality management system. So that's you know. Records are not being documented properly, so like equipment or training or competency evaluation records, internal audits, management reviews.

00:05:38 BRIAN: Not up to date or some issue with conformance policies and procedures not up to standard for conformance to R18 or one of the other quality management system standards.  So those those are. The four general categories of facilities, equipment, personnel and quality management system.

00:05:55 KIM: OK, now that we covered the general stuff, labs may have issues with. Let's get into the specific.

00:06:02 BRIAN: All right. So first up, we're going to talk about the standard that just about every concrete testing laboratory cares about and that is ASTM C1077.  And this, for those of you who don't know, this is a quality management system standard that is developed by ASTM Committee C9. It has some similarities with AASHTO R18, but it's got some very specific details that are not in AASHTO R18. If you are a laboratory, you probably know that the most common. Two issues that come up with C1077. Kim, you want to take a shot at that?

00:06:38 KIM: Because this is a quality system one I'm assuming it has to do with some paperwork.

00:06:45 BRIAN: Some certifications, yes, you are correct. Certifications are the I mean I didn't really rank these, but I can tell you that that is the most common issue with C1077. Just about every laboratory deals with it. Personnel change all the time and they're trying to keep up with certifications and it's not easy to do.

00:07:05 KIM: You kind of mentioned people are changing all the time, but what's the most challenging part for laboratories dealing with proper certifications for C1077?

00:07:13 BRIAN: I think lack of availability of certification program, so you hire somebody and you really want to get them trained and certified as quickly as you can so that you can get them out working on projects that require that and you might run into an issue because the program isn't available for another several months. So then what do you do? Uh, you know, you could have the person doing other kind of work at your laboratory that doesn't require certification. Or you could send them somewhere farther away, which no one wants to do with a brand new employee that you really haven't developed trust with. To invest that kind of money in them. So that's probably the biggest challenge. I mean, there are certainly laboratories that try to avoid spending money at any cost. And I think that's another issue and. I'm not going to keep repeating that, but that is a pervasive problem for them people just they want to be in conformance, but they don't want to spend the time or money sometimes to get into conformance.

00:08:07 KIM: So what are some of the other common ones?

00:08:09 BRIAN: Yeah, so C1077 is one of the two standards, along with E 329. It requires the technical director to hold a professional engineers license or credential. So it's not that you just have to know a PE or you have to have a PE on staff somewhere, it's that. The person that holds the position of technical director has to have a PE license, so this can be a problem from the point of the assessment where they're asked the question. They should be saying, OK, who's your technical director, or let me look at your org chart and see who the technical director is, and then verify that that person has a PE license. But I think what happens sometimes is says they, they say, who is your PE?  And then they say, oh, let's see. Do we have PE? Who is? Ohh yeah, this this person is a PE. That's go ahead and put them down, but that person might not be the technical director. So if that person is not the technical director, that is a nonconformity.

00:09:08 KIM: We have a podcast episode season 2, episode 13 about. License PE requirements and I will put that in the show notes and I will try to put all of the episodes and references to anything that we're talking about. I may miss some, so don't hold me accountable to that because there's going to be a lot. But I know I will put that in the show notes so you can reference that. But we do have an episode just on PE requirements.

00:09:33 BRIAN: Thank you for that. And I don't want to be too repetitive, so I'm going to cover some of these things. But they do come up in the others as well. There are reporting is. Use so standards have reporting requirements for how you report your test results. And C1077 says your reporting has to include things that are required in those standards. So that would be a nonconformity for ASTM C1077. Also org chart might be out of date personnel not presented.  This is another one that you know that on a similar vein of the other discussion I had, sometimes people will prepare a special org chart to get through the assessment or to. Include people who aren't certified on the org chart that they give. And they shouldn't be doing that. Uh, what that does is it hides non-conforming situations from people and then it makes it seem like you're in conformance when you're not. And then we have a lack of trust which we don't want to have.

00:10:33 KIM: Yeah, that seems super shady to do that. So I think it just general rule of thumb, if you're creating anything special and unique for an assessment or inspection. That's not or an audit you have any kind that that's not an accurate representation like you're just doing yourself a disservice.  If you have to create something specifically to conform that you're not actually doing.

00:10:58 BRIAN: Yeah, and I'll, I'll save everybody. The soap box session here, but we definitely have a an issue with ethics that needs to be addressed with this point. Some people are so far off base with their ethical responsibility that doesn't even occur to them that they are misleading people by leaving people off the org chart or by not presenting certain information. I can't tell when I'm having a conversation with somebody about that. If they are just being dishonest with me, or if they're also being dishonest with themselves. Like that, they don't even realize that they are being dishonest. It definitely concerns me because over the years I've had enough interactions with people where I think somebody needs to like, explain them what. Honesty is and like what? What is true and what is not it? It just seems strange to have to explain that to an adult. But sometimes that's the case. Sorry I did not save you the soap box moment.

00:11:54 KIM: Moving on.

00:11:54 BRIAN: Next one not having corrective actions on low proficiency sample testing ratings, so even ratings of two which we don't need you to send to us. You should still take corrective action and still document them and still maintain them at your laboratory.

00:12:07 KIM: For the corrective actions, there needs to be a specific report, but it doesn't have to be necessarily. I believe we have a version on our website that you can use a form, but it doesn't have to be in that form. It just has to be done and documented that it was done or what are the requirements about that.

00:12:16 BRIAN: Oh yeah.  Yeah, you don't have to use our form. I mean, we have an example form. People can use it. You know, you could use that if you want, but.  But I was thinking like if you create your own forms it's much better because you address it the way you know needs to be addressed. You include what the elements that you want to include there are certain minimum requirements and all the standards, but I really think people should think more about what works for them. You know, make sure you meet the minimum requirements.  But then you may want to add some things that are just useful to you.

00:12:56 KIM: Regarding specifically the corrective action report. Or form what is specifically required to be on that? Or where can people find that what's required when they're creating their own form?

00:13:08 BRIAN: Well, the big thing is you right? What went wrong? OK, what was the issue? What did your investigate? Investigation yield. You know. What did you find out where causal factors or the root cause of the problem? And then you want to take immediate corrective action. You know, you can have a corrective action section or you can break it down into.  Parts, but you know immediate corrective action. Like. So let's say you found out you're just doing horribly on a certain test on proficiency samples. Well, you should immediately stop accepting those tests or like, say, OK, you know, we have. We have orders back there to run these tests. Let's figure out what's going on before we make another mistake on a client sample. That would be a considered an immediate corrective action. So then you you look into it, you figure out what went wrong, you take your corrective action. You document that too. You explained what you did to correct the issue. And then you would also put into place some kind of monitoring activity and you'd want to explain what that is in your corrective action too. So that way you follow up and make sure that whatever changes you made have been effective because a lot of times you do your best and you find out. Ohh, I actually didn't catch it. You know, it's still going on. So then you want to go back and say, alright, let's go back to.

00:14:16 KIM: OK.

00:14:24 BRIAN: The drawing board and see what's going on. This is all these are management tools for people and I think if you want to, I mean most people want to do their best, right? And there should be continual improvement all the time. You should be thinking about things you can do.  Better and this?  Is just another way to make improvements.

00:14:42 KIM: Thats helpful. I think that's helpful, yeah.

00:14:45 BRIAN: Yeah, we'll see. If it's not, you can always e-mail me and say that wasn't very helpful. Could I get some more information or different information on that? We can always have another podcast episode.

00:14:45 KIM: I mean.  On it exactly. I was like, it seems to make sense to me, but I don't have work at a laboratory. It doesn't have to make sense to me.  What are some of the other common findings for C1077?

00:15:07 BRIAN: Other things standards are out of date or not presented or not available to the staff. Procedures missing from the quality management system, so they might not have a policy or procedure that's supposed to be in there and just records missing or missing information. So that covers just about everything in C1077.

00:15:25 KIM: When you compiled all these, were you surprised by anything that wasn't on the list of common ones?

00:15:31 BRIAN: No, I was not. And but as we go along, there is one that did surprise me. So I'll I'll make sure I point that out. OK. And you know what? I'm so trained by you on that question that I actually will volunteer that information now. And I'm giving a presentation. What was that surprised by? Like, I think I should mention that to people. So thank you for that. And it really is the ultimate question.

00:15:51 KIM: You're welcome. I mean, I think there is so much you can learn from that and people can learn from that. But now when responding to these common nonconformities that the lab has those, we do have information on the. A few podcasts and a document of how to resolve findings and reports, and what kind of documentation you need to do so. If it's a procedural finding versus a QMS kind of thing, or whatever, like we have information on that.  So we don't think. We need to rehash it here, but just so everybody knows, we do have resources. If you're like, OK, well, I have that finding on my report. How do I resolve it? What does the QA need to see? I will definitely link to the appropriate materials so you can reference that in the show.  Notes, so just.

00:16:44 BRIAN: Quick summary, you include your corrective action. We kind of went for a corrective action report and then supporting documentation that that confirms what you've done, you know, picture of whatever record, whatever The thing is that shows that you actually did what you're saying is what you would submit.

00:17:00 KIM: That really summarizes all of the things we've spent hours talking and covering about in previous episodes into a sentence that's great and also sad.

00:17:12 BRIAN: Well, you know, keeping it simple is always the way to go.

00:17:16 KIM: Yes, keeping it. Simple is always a great rule of thumb. I totally agree. And with that in mind, I think this is a good place to end this episode. Now, thank you for listening and thank you, Brian for your time. But stay tuned for future episodes where we go over common findings for other concrete standards. 

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00:17:35 ANNOUNCER: Thanks for listening to AASHTO re: source Q & A. If you'd like to be a guest or just submit a question, send us an email at podcast@aashtoresource.org or call Brian at 240-436-4820. For other news and related content, check out AASHTO re:source's social media accounts or go to aashtoresource.org.