Why not spreadsheets, PDF generators, or a generic QMS?

The fastest way to start. Track joints, log heat numbers, drop values into a template that prints a tidy document. For a small job under one code with one reviewer, it's a reasonable place to be — and we'd rather say so than sell you a platform you don't need yet.

• No computed ranges — the sheet holds the numbers you typed but doesn't know a qualification tested at one thickness covers a band of production thicknesses, so the judgement lives in someone's head.
• No enforced hold points — a cell can be filled in before the inspection it depends on has happened, and nothing stops it.
• The dossier is rebuilt at the end — someone gathers files from several folders, checks each matches the revision that applied, and hopes nothing was edited in place. That's where the hours and the audit risk concentrate.

They turn your inputs into clean, correctly laid-out WPS, PQR and WPQ paperwork, and save the tedium of formatting a procedure by hand. If you need a good-looking document from values you've already decided, they deliver it.

• They don't reason — they record the essential variables but don't compute the qualified range, so the document tells you what was tested, not what it covers.
• They treat each document in isolation — when a weld must satisfy more than one regime at once (EN ISO 15614 and ASME IX, or PED layered on EN 1090), a generator prints two documents but won't reconcile them or flag where a variable qualified under one falls short under the other.

Document control, approval workflows, non-conformity tracking and an audit trail — the scaffolding of a managed process, across your whole organisation, not just the workshop. If your aim is to show a process exists and is followed, it covers that.

• No depth — it routes a document for approval but doesn't know what a welding procedure is, that a welder's qualification has an expiry and continuity requirement, or that an NDT report belongs to a specific technique and acceptance class.
• No code engine underneath — no essential variables, no qualified ranges — so the domain judgement stays in the same spreadsheets you were trying to leave.
• No one-click MRB or MDR — it holds your documents but doesn't assemble the sealed, ordered handover dossier a client expects, because it doesn't understand the shape of that dossier.