Trident Reporter

The Belwind project offshore Belgium is used to develop a tool to keep track of health, safety, environmental and quality issues during the building of a windfarm. During the building of the Amalia windfarm offshore IJmuiden (NL) no such tool existed and reporting and administration of issues was done with individual documents. It became clear that organizing this by means of a software tool would make live much easier. Reporter is the result of this idea.

People responsible for the reporting of HSE (health, safety, environment) and quality issues use a laptop and a camera to register issues. Data are stored locally in a database. As soon as the reporting person has a stable access to the internet (from a ship back into a hotel room for instance), he or she can synchronise his or her local database with the central database at the office. When only e-mail contact is stable it is possible to send the latest entries to the local database by mail to the office, where they can be added to the central database.

Most of the reporting is done by making choices from pull-down menu's. This means little extra effort, standardises the reports and allows for easy searches within the database. Multiple pictures can be attached to issues by uploading them from the camera to the pc, and then dragging and dropping them to the issue. Pictures are stored securely within the database so issues cannot lose their pictures. Picture size is reduced interactively to keep down synchronisation times.

The same pull-down menu based interface can be used to search the database and to make listings of specific issues. Individual issues as well as listings can be exported for use in other programs. The central database keeps track of the complete history of all issues, the local databases only contain the most recent references to the issues.