OpenSME helps construction and engineering firms digitise permit-to-work flows, incident reporting, and subcontractor management, giving project managers and principal contractors real-time site intelligence without adding burden to the frontline.
Construction sites generate enormous compliance obligations: permit-to-work, hot work permits, confined space entry, toolbox talks, incident reports, subcontractor inductions. In most SME contractors, these are managed on paper, WhatsApp, and shared drives that create an audit trail that is incomplete at best and legally indefensible at worst.
Project managers and principal contractors have limited real-time visibility of what is actually happening on site. Issues surface through phone calls and site walks, not through structured data. When something goes wrong, the investigation is hampered by the lack of documentation that should have existed from day one.
These components from the OpenSME catalog are most relevant to your industry. They work standalone or combined — configured to your specific workflows, not adapted from generic software.
Digitise permit-to-work forms, toolbox talk sign-offs, subcontractor induction records, and daily safety walk checklists with mandatory fields, supervisor sign-off, and instant audit trail.
Conduct site safety inspections, quality walks, and progress checks via mobile, with photo evidence, GPS-tagged observations, and instant routing of issues to the responsible party.
Site workers and supervisors log safety observations, near misses, defects, and non-conformances in seconds, with photo, location, severity, and auto-routing to the site manager.
Create and track corrective actions, non-conformance closures, and rectification work orders, ensuring every identified issue has an owner, a deadline, and a verified close-out.
Tracks permit expiries, overdue inspections, incomplete toolbox talks, and unresolved safety observations, flagging each to the responsible supervisor before it becomes a regulatory breach.
A live safety and progress view for project managers and principal contractors: open permits, active safety flags, inspection completion rates, and outstanding corrective actions.
Using our component delivery methodology, a standard deployment for your industry follows this four-week arc — small, focused, and live before the momentum fades.
Typical operational scenarios for your industry — and how OpenSME components address each one in a real deployment.
A mechanical and engineering contractor issues 30 to 50 permits per day on paper. Active permits are tracked on a whiteboard. When an audit is called without notice, the team cannot locate 40% of permit records from the previous month.
Digital Checklist Builder digitises all PTW types with approval workflows. Compliance Monitor tracks every active permit with expiry time and signatory status. The project manager's Command Dashboard shows all live permits in real time.
The audit passes without findings. The contractor wins a subsequent tender partly on the basis of their demonstrated digital safety management capability, explicitly cited by the principal in the award notification.
A civil engineering contractor wants to improve safety culture, moving from a culture where incidents are hidden to one where near misses are reported and learned from. The paper reporting form is seen as bureaucratic, so it is rarely used.
Issue & Defect Reporter is configured as a simple near-miss tool accessible from any site worker phone in under 30 seconds with no login required. Reports go to the HSE team who close out each one. A team recognition mechanic acknowledges near-miss reports publicly each week.
Near-miss reports increase from an average of 3 per month to 47 in the first month. Two significant hazards are identified and eliminated as a direct result of reports that would previously not have been made.
A main contractor managing 12 subcontractors requires every worker to complete a site induction before starting work. Currently tracked on paper sign-in sheets, records are frequently incomplete and the site manager spends hours each week chasing missing documentation.
Digital Checklist Builder creates a digital induction sign-off that each worker completes on-site via a shared tablet. Compliance Monitor tracks completion by subcontractor and flags any worker starting work without a completed record.
Induction completion rate rises to 100% and is verifiable. The weekly administration burden drops from 4 hours to 20 minutes. When the principal contractor queries subcontractor compliance, the report is produced in seconds.
We will walk you through the components most relevant to your specific workflows — no commitment, no generic demo script.