Efficiencies in Procurement and Licensing of Type-B Fissile Package

For any organization, procurement of specialized transport packages requires a significant investment of resources. The process may take up to six years to procure and license a transport package for Type-B fissile contents. This includes defining the need, selecting a supplier, completion of a design, licensing with the regulator and fabrication. If rework is required at any stage, the timeline can increase significantly. In order to improve efficiency in procuring and licensing transport packages at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), a process improvement exercise was undertaken. This exercise brought together an internal team to map and optimize the CNL procurement process (including design, certification and fabrication) for radioactive material packaging. Type-B Fissile packaging was chosen as representative of all radioactive material packaging as it typically has the most complex process for procurement. Procurement of packaging requires input from subject matter experts in management systems, procurement, quality assurance, operations, radiation protection, business development and engineering. These experts are required in order to ensure that the final product is compliant and meets CNL’s operational and business needs. Process improvement opportunities found include leveraging procurement framework contracts with approved suppliers; establishing a standard set of subject matter experts for package review meetings; and creating a packaging database to track a package through its entire lifecycle, starting before the package approval is complete. With these process improvements, significant efficiencies were found, most notably a reduction in the time to delivery of the licensed package and in the number of process steps required to complete the procurement and certification.