PPE issuance and equipment records

While a site has a few dozen people and a handful of items, a logbook is enough. Trouble starts with turnover, shift work and contractors: signatures sit in the storekeeper's binder, entitlements in an annex to a policy, and stock in a spreadsheet one person maintains.

The consequences are predictable. Nobody knows whether someone moving to a new role received the full set that role requires. Nobody sees which items are running out until a worker turns up for them. After an incident, proof of issue has to be found by hand — and sometimes it does not exist at all.

An electronic register does not change the rules of entitlement; it changes access to information. A person's equipment history, an item's stock level and the list of approaching dates are visible immediately, without digging through paper.

Equipment protecting against risks with irreversible consequences — fall-arrest harnesses, lanyards and energy absorbers, respiratory protection, chemical protection — does not end at handover. The manufacturer sets a service life and inspection rules, and equipment past its date or involved in an event must be withdrawn from use.

Such items are recorded individually, with serial number, date of manufacture, date of issue and next inspection date. That is a qualitative difference from ordinary gloves: the specific unit matters, not the number of pairs in stock.

It then becomes easy to answer the question that usually follows an incident or an audit: where is that unit, who uses it and is its inspection current. The system does not perform the inspection — it records the outcome and keeps the date in view.