The challenge
Nobody is allowed onto an industrial site without valid certification. If an installer's working-at-height permit has expired, they cannot work — and the rotation and the plane ticket have already been paid for. Expiry dates were tracked by hand in a spreadsheet, so a lapse surfaced at the worst possible moment. The client needed a service that watches the dates itself and gives warning in advance.
What we built
- The board. The main screen is a grid — workers down the side, certificate types across the top, a coloured dot at each intersection. Green means valid for more than a month, amber means expiring within thirty days, red means expired or expiring this week, purple means this person does not need it, empty means missing. One look covers the whole team.
- Worker cards. Every certificate with its dates and scan, identity details, and a history of when the person was hired, moved between groups, and left.
- Notifications. Every morning the service checks the dates and emails managers about their own groups and workers about their own documents. An expiry is no longer a surprise.
- Ordering. A section for ordering new certificates, with prices per training provider, showing what has been ordered, what is in progress and what is ready.
- Roles and export. Administrators see everyone, managers see their own groups. The whole table exports to Excel in one click — useful to send to a client or take to site.
The interesting part: it does not stand alone
The worker lists in this service and in the project management system are linked. A new installer appearing in the project system is registered here within fifteen minutes, with no double entry. Rotations are pulled through automatically, so the person handling certificates can see who is on site now and whose permits to check first. Matching is by name with protection against spelling variants, and ambiguous cases can be linked by hand.
The result is that personnel records and production records agree, even though they are two separate services on separate servers.
The result
Not one case since launch of somebody arriving on rotation with a lapsed permit and waiting for a replacement on site. Managers stopped keeping their own private spreadsheets of expiry dates. Assembling the certification pack to get a crew onto a site takes minutes.