MRB, databook, dispatch dossier: what your customer is actually asking for

They’re all names for the same kind of deliverable: a compiled book of project documents your customer wants at handover, built to their specification. The name tells you less than you’d hope. What defines the book is the specification attached to your purchase order, and two customers using the same name will ask for two different books.

Here’s what the common names signal.

MRB (manufacturing record book). The most common request. The record of how the equipment was actually made: material certificates, weld and test records, inspection reports, code documentation, final drawings.

Databook (or data book, both spellings are in circulation). The generic name, and often the umbrella word for the whole family. What a given customer means by it is whatever their specification says it contains.

Quality dossier / quality manual. In practice the same book: the quality records for the scope. If a specification asks for a quality manual on a fabrication order, it almost never means your ISO manual. Read the contents list before assuming.

Dispatch dossier. The set that travels with, or just behind, the shipment. Usually smaller than the MRB and needed earlier, because the receiving site wants it when the equipment arrives, not at final handover.

Technical dossier. The engineering side: drawings, datasheets, calculations, manuals.

Mud book. The drilling world’s name for its record book. Same idea, different industry vocabulary.

You’ll also see quality book, inspection book and dispatch book. Same family.

The three things worth knowing

They’re separate deliverables, not sections of one another. One order can owe an MRB and a dispatch dossier and a technical dossier, and those are three books with three due dates, not one book with three chapters. Quote the document work as one book per order, and a specification that turns out to call for four is an expensive discovery.

Same name, different book. One EPC’s MRB specification runs to section numbering, contents depth, which document codes appear even when nothing was issued against them, and how the pages are numbered. Another EPC’s MRB is “everything, bookmarked, one PDF.” The name gives you the genre. The specification gives you the deliverable. Quote and plan from the specification.

Don’t argue with the name. If the customer calls it a mud book, it’s a mud book. The name is theirs; the work of matching their structure is yours either way.

Where DocBoss comes in

DocBoss doesn’t care which name your customer uses, and that’s the point: MRB, databook, mud book, dispatch dossier, quality dossier, technical dossier are all the same generate operation against a different structure. You set which document codes belong in each book and how the contents lay out, and the book compiles from the documents already approved on the project, bookmarked, hyperlinked and paginated. One structure can produce one book for the order or a separate book per tag, per train, per pump or per skid. When a specification demands several different books from the same project, that’s several structures, not several projects’ worth of work.

If your orders come with book specifications, it’s worth a demo against one of your own.