Texas brings down the hammer on the "Industrial Exemption" 1

[StressGuy]

It will be interesting to see if this catches on elsewhere or leads to the industrial exemption being completely eliminated. It's interesting that the Texas Board has taken pretty much the exact opposite stand as the California PE code.

http://engineers.texas.gov/nm/EAOR34ResponseFinal52114.pdf

Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas

"All the world is a Spring"

All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.

 

[JAE]

I guess every state I'm licensed in pretty much matches that.
If you are a private consultant and do engineering work for an "industry" or industrial company you have to seal the work.

The only industrial exemption I'm aware of is if the engineer actually works for the industrial company and does in-house work only for them - then a seal is not required.
That seems to be what the Texas document you posted says.

 

[JedClampett]

In Arizona, utilties and railroads don't have to seal their work.
Under 32-144 Exemptions and limitations A.7;
"A nonregistrant who designs buildings or structures to be erected on property owned or leased by the nonregistrant or by a person, firm or corporation, including a utility, telephone, mining or railroad company, which employs the nonregistrant on a full‑time basis, if the buildings or structures are intended solely for the use of the owner or lessee of the property, are not ordinarily occupied by more than twenty people, are not for sale to, rental to or use by the public and conform to the building code adopted by the city, town or county in which the building is to be erected or altered."
I think this is pretty common. They have good lobbyists.

 

[wannabeSE]

California's exemption does not apply to civil engineering

6747. Exemption for industries
(a) This chapter, except for those provisions that apply to civil engineers and civil engineering, shall not apply to the performance of engineering work by a manufacturing, mining, public utility, research and development, or other industrial corporation, or by employees of that corporation, provided that work is in connection with, or incidental to, the products, systems, or services of that corporation or its affiliates.
(b) For purposes of this section, “employees” also includes consultants, temporary employees, contract employees, and those persons hired pursuant to third-party contracts.

 

[IRstuff]

For a state run by people supposedly wanting less government, the trapping of consultants seems completely weird. California's PE act makes much more sense to me. We had consultants help us with debugging algorithms; how does one even contemplate "stamping" "I fixed the bug?"

The professional licensure is primarily to ensure public safety, not to line the coffers of the licensure board or the state. If it made sense that that the employee is exempt, then any consultant doing similar work ought to be exempt as well. There is no licensing exam for programmers, so how would a PE license even make an iota of sense?

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[moltenmetal]

The rules can say what they will, but what makes a license effective is enforcement. If there were no traffic cops, few people would bother with a driver's license. We have a very narrow industrial exception/exemption here in Ontario, but it is enforced more or less as if it were the broad exemption in place in most US states.

 

[IRstuff]

For that matter, there are literally dozens of disciplines for which a typical PE would be unqualified to do any consulting on:
> Semiconductor process engineering
> Materials engineering
> Programming
> Image processing
> Thermal analysis using FEA
> Inertial navigation

Each of the above has been serviced by consultants at companies that I've worked for. If there were a PE requirement imposed on them, we would have been SOL, and the consulting industry in California would vaporize, as it would require consultants to study for, and take, an exam on material that they would never use, and possibly never learned in the first place.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[GregLocock]

I'm gently wondering what the effect on the good ol PE boys club would be if they were inundated with lots of highly paid chip-nerds and greasy handed mechies? Noses out of joint I suspect.

Cheers

Greg Locock


New here? Try reading these, they might help FAQ731-376

http://eng-tips.com/market.cfm?

 

[TheTick]

Business as usual for corporate product design critters like myself.

 

[StressGuy]

That's an interesting thought. I hadn't (and doubt the board considered) consultants such as IT types in this application.

The question was directly raised to ask about EPC (Engineering, Procurement, Construction) companies like the one I work for and our relationship with our industrial clients. As a matter of history going back to well before I was born, we have rarely PE stamped any deliverables to the refineries and chemical plants we do work for. There have been exceptions where particular clients wanted certain deliverables stamped, and we've done so.

Still, historically, the industry is light on PE's as they haven't been necessary. I am a PE myself, but I can probably count on one hand the number of projects I've worked in the last ten years that I needed to stamp anything.

This is going to create a great deal of heart burn, and I expect it will be at least as much on the owner/operator side of the fence as upon the EPC side. Flowsheets are one case that comes to mind - these basic systems drawings of a unit are often provided in an initial state from a company that owns the technology and sells a licensed package to the O/O. An EPC like mine receives that package and engineers it through detail design. Does the license company need to PE stamp all their deliverables to the O/O? Do our process engineers need to notify the licensor company of all the changes we make during detail design? Or, since the flowsheets and such some on drawings with control numbers assigned by the O/O - are these really the owners drawings that we are just working on? That last is how I think the lack of stamping was rationalized - that we were doing exempt work for an exempt industries "internal" drawings. Yet, the language of the Texas board suggests that is no longer going to be considered the case. That's just one example that occurred to me and there are many others.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas

"All the world is a Spring"

All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.

 

[ColonelSanders]

So, as an engineer who is not a lawyer yet responsible for adhering to rules in legalese which have apparently long been misinterpreted. I have one unresolved question even with the current board interpretation on the stamping of work for industrial clients.

Does this requirement mean that the final report and drawings for a "Widget FEA analysis" done by a consulting firm for an industrial client require those items to be stamped? Is the board imposing the same stamping requirement to all items engineered by engineering consulting firms as it imposes to the stamping of the engineering design of bridges? Is the bar set such that all engineered products (reports and drawings) by consulting firms be stamped if installed in Texas?

If that's what they intend, I think it needs to be stated clearly, with a rule section specifically covering engineering consulting. Otherwise this will just be futile argument until the board issues a reprimand.

 

[xnuke]

Does this requirement mean that the final report and drawings for a "Widget FEA analysis" done by a consulting firm for an industrial client require those items to be stamped? Is the board imposing the same stamping requirement to all items engineered by engineering consulting firms as it imposes to the stamping of the engineering design of bridges? Is the bar set such that all engineered products (reports and drawings) by consulting firms be stamped if installed in Texas?

Seems pretty clear to me:

...a “consulting company” is required to be a Texas registered engineering firm
and the “industrial client” is a client of that engineering firm. In answer to the requestor’s
question, any engineering work provided by consulting companies for projects located in Texas
and provided to an industrial client of the engineering firm must:
1) Be performed by a Texas licensed professional engineer (§ 1001.004) and;
2) The final version of that work must be sealed, signed, and dated by a Texas licensed
professional engineer (§137.33).

xnuke
"Live and act within the limit of your knowledge and keep expanding it to the limit of your life." Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged.
Please see FAQ731-376 for tips on how to make the best use of Eng-Tips.

 

[IRstuff]

It's pretty clear that the Texas PE act does not have the same leeway that the California PE act does, wherein it explicitly states that consultants to exempt companies are treated the same as the exempt employees of those companies.

TTFN
faq731-376

Need help writing a question or understanding a reply? forum1529

 

[StressGuy]

IRstuff,

That irony is not lost on me. When I first became licensed in California, that formulation of the industrial exemption stood out to me in its explicit endorsement of exempting consulting companies. Texas has effectively operated by the same standard as California since before I was born. I find it hard to believe that the Board never knew this is how the relationship between firms and industrial clients has worked.

I may have to change my tagline to "May you live in interesting times"

Edward L. Klein
Pipe Stress Engineer
Houston, Texas

"All the world is a Spring"

All opinions expressed here are my own and not my company's.