The UK's National Oceanography Centre (NOC) has deployed a South African-developed software solution to improve and automate its site and facility management.
Developed in SA and distributed by Solution House UK, Incident Desk is an incident and service request sourcing, routing and management engine. It provides site and facility managers with functionality for recording, tracking, visualising, alerting, escalating and reporting on site-related incidents, from infrastructure repair, scheduled service checks, intrusion alerts and criminal incidents.
It also eliminates manual incident reports and introduces mobile incident management for security and maintenance staff.
NOC is the UK's largest institution for integrated sea level science, coastal and deep ocean research and technology development.
Together with its partners, NOC confronts key scientific challenges such as sea level change, the oceans' role in climate change, predicting and simulating the behaviour of the oceans through computer modelling, development, the future of the Arctic Ocean and long-term monitoring technologies.
Tiaan Janse van Rensburg, director at Solution House, says Incident Desk is also used in many industries in SA, such as urban management, retail and distribution, facility and maintenance management, security and health and safety.
"Incident Desk is used to run arguably one of the largest private urban management and public safety solutions in SA, which encompasses many central improvement districts, areas, buildings, estates and shopping malls in one solution in real-time," Janse van Rensburg says.
"It is a software framework which can be used to launch service request solutions and integrated smartphone apps without any development skills. We can create a new smartphone app running on our framework in under 15 minutes. It is also one of the only 'multi-tenant' solutions in SA - think Uber - which has the ability to link the public with an unlimited number of service providers and an unlimited number of areas and countries."
Keeping more than 2 500 scientists, engineers, technologists, support staff and students safe across the NOC's two operational sites, one of which is shared with a university, and securing the institution's assets in compliance with relevant legislation is one of the primary responsibilities of NOC security supervisor Paul Dent.
"In past years, this complex function was primarily managed through a system of physical daily occurrence books (DOB), which made it time-consuming, labour-intensive and difficult to manage in real-time," says Dent. "Regardless of how many rules you put in place, using a manual DOB system means you can't really get an accurate sense of what's happening in and around the NOC at any given point, which is not ideal for a busy site with highly sensitive equipment and research facilities.
"We typically have multiple 'incidents' that we capture and track, including but not limited to building management alarms and checks, fire alarm system checks, fire alarm activations, water leaks, electricity supply failure, lost and found property and criminal offences. What we needed was a digital alternative that would not only replicate our manual DOB processes and help us manage multiple incidents more effectively, but also give us more ways to quickly and accurately report and track them as they happen. Typically, we record about 3 000 security-related incidents or occurrences every month."
The NOC is in discussions with Solution House about potential future add-ons to the system, including a real-time security guard tracking and reporting system.
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