Valve Supplier API license Suspended - How to Follow Up

[chasserman]

Some assistance please,

One of our valve suppliers out of China have had their API license suspended and we have placed a large ball valve order through them. It appears that the API certification may have expired due to paperwork issues rather than quality concerns, however that is unproven. Either way, there may be issues regarding warranty and the acceptability of any valves that were manufactured while the API certificate was lapsed.

Any ideas how we stand here legally or from a warranty point of view should any of the valves from this order fail in the field ? Should we block these valves being put in service until the API license is recertified ?

Any other ideas from a technical point of view on how I should follow this up ?

Thanks

Chasserman

 

[zdas04]

My experience getting warranty repairs/replacements from any low-bidder (and especially from India or China) has been horrible. Certifications, licenses, and promises are just not worth the ether they are printed on. You had a reason for going with them, and that reason was probably not their high reputation for quality. It seems to me that you should have done this soul searching prior to placing the order, not after the valves are delivered. At this point there simply is no good outcome. The API "certification" (I'm assuming you mean the right to apply the API logo to their valves) means a lot for several minutes after they achieve permission to use it. The API does not audit performance in the next week/month/year/decade. Many tank manufacturers had an API nomograph and make non-compliant products. It is the same with valve manufacturers. The certification means that they met certain standards for manufacturing and record keeping at the time of the application.

This company lost their certification either before or after your valve order was complete. I'll bet that the valves manufactured while the certification was lapsed are marked with the same stamps as the ones before and after the lapse. If loosing the certification truly was just a paperwork snafu then you don't have anything to worry about (beyond what you should be worrying about in any low-bid job). If they lost it for cause, that means that enough people complained loudly enough to force an enforcement action. If that is the case I would take all the valves from that manufacturer and sell them to a scrap metal dealer. Even with an enforceable warranty, you will spend more money blowing down your lines and in lost production during a shutdown than the low-bid savings could ever be worth. I always ask my clients to calculate the value of the gas they will have to blow down if a particular valve failed. Often, the answer is staggering--it is common for a single blowdown to cost more than 10,000 times the cost savings between low bidder and high bidder. But we keep treating valves as a commodity.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

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