Electronic Safety Passport: An Innovative System for Monitoring Worker Qualifications at an NPP Construction Site

The Problem of Lost Working Time During Daily Checks

Managing large construction projects, especially at foreign sites involving local personnel, inevitably faces logistical and communication barriers. During the construction of the Rooppur NPP in Bangladesh, a hidden problem affecting productivity emerged: the daily verification of documents before granting work clearance took a critical amount of time. Vladimir Timofeev, Deputy Chief Engineer at Energospetsmontazh JSC, explains how the traditional control procedure became a catalyst for digitalization.

As part of the corporate "safety line," a foreman must ensure that every worker is legitimately present on site. A single fitter may have up to six different certificates: HSE, fire safety minimum, work at height, hot work, as well as a medical certificate. Manually checking the validity periods of each document for a crew of 150 – 200 people led to a loss of 15 – 20 minutes at the start of every shift. On the scale of the entire construction site, this resulted in colossal financial losses and disrupted planned targets.

Architecture of the Electronic Safety Passport

To eliminate downtime, an electronic safety passport was developed — an individual badge with a QR code on one side and a worker's photograph for visual identification on the other. The speaker details the mechanics of the system, which did not require purchasing expensive equipment or complex development.

The standard 1C platform, which was already used for HR records, became the basis for the solution. A summary table was added to the system, where responsible persons (timekeepers at the sites) enter up-to-date data on completed training, briefings, and medical examinations. The program automatically generates a QR code, which is printed and laminated. During a line check, the foreman simply points a smartphone camera with any code-reading app at the worker's badge — the entire summary of clearances is instantly displayed on the screen. The verification time for one person was reduced to 5 – 10 seconds.

Economic Impact and Scaling the Experience

The presentation details the economic paradox of the implementation: penny-pinching costs brought substantial financial benefits. Providing 800 branch workers with laminated QR-code cards cost only 1,490 rubles (the cost of paper and laminating film). At the same time, the savings amounted to almost 1 million rubles per year.

This amount was achieved by eliminating the need to constantly purchase and replace paper certificate covers. In a subtropical climate with high humidity and construction dust, traditional documents became unusable in a month and a half. The electronic passport solved this problem, and the successful experience is now being replicated at the new El Dabaa NPP construction site in Egypt, where the workforce will exceed 27,000 people.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to reduce the morning work clearance time for a crew from 20 minutes to a few seconds?
• How to use the standard 1C system to generate individual QR codes with training data?
• How does implementing a 1,500-ruble system save 1 million rubles a year?
• How to distribute the functionality for updating data in electronic passports so as not to overload the HSE department?
• How to establish control over PPE use and safety compliance when working with foreign personnel amidst differences in mentalities and legislation?