Nothing a Tyneside subsea or offshore-access firm builds leaves the quay without a certification dossier, and assembling that dossier (proof-load results, lifting certificates, material traceability and design sign-offs) is where the real cost of the work hides. The facts in it are scattered across a project schedule, a set of works orders, a design store and a pile of inspection records, and they get hand-stitched into a compliant package at the end of every job. The North East carries 5,000-plus energy-related businesses and is one of six UK Centres for Offshore Renewable Engineering, and most of that supply chain is exactly this kind of firm: operationally complex, running real fixed-price engineering, with no developer on staff. The documentation burden that rides on every package is what sends them looking for custom software, and it is what this page is about.
The visible anchor is the regenerated shipyard corridor at Walker. Neptune Energy Park is a 60-plus acre former-shipyard cluster on the Tyne with a 750m deep-water quay, and its tenant list (Baker Hughes, Royal IHC, Bridon-Bekaert, JDR, SMD Tech Works, the Newcastle University Subsea Academy) reads like a who’s-who of the sector. Those headline names are not the buyers here; they run their own engineering departments. The firms with the operational problem and no engineering team are the ones threaded through the same supply chain: the fabrication and access-systems SMEs, the machinists, the test-and-inspection houses, the MRO specialists.
The Tyne Supply Chain Runs on Disconnected Project, ERP and Design Systems
The shape of the problem is consistent across the cluster because the systems are. The EPC-style project schedule lives in Oracle Primavera P6, or Microsoft Project on smaller packages. The bill of materials, works orders and shop-floor data live in an SME ERP/MRP: Sage 200 Manufacturing, 123Insight, or IFS Cloud at the larger end. The detailed design and structural analysis sit in SolidWorks. Each is a capable, authoritative tool. None of them shares data with the next.
So cost-against-budget and milestone status are reconciled by hand, after the fact. A design revision in SolidWorks does not flow into the BOM or the works orders on the floor, so material requirements and build status are rekeyed and drift apart. A manager cannot answer the only question that matters on a live package (are we on budget, on schedule, and is the cert pack complete?) without opening four systems and assembling the answer manually. Tyne Gangway (Structures) Ltd on Wincomblee Road in Walker, a marine-access designer-manufacturer with a DNV-GL certified welding facility and ISO 9001:2015 accreditation, is exactly the profile: enough engineering and quality complexity to need joined-up systems, no in-house team to build them.
Where the Certification Dossier Becomes the Real Data Burden
For most Tyne fabricators the heaviest, least visible cost is not the build. It is the paperwork the build has to ship with. Nothing goes offshore without a documentation package, and assembling that package by hand is where margin disappears.
An offshore lifting appliance must be designed, proof-load tested and certified to DNV-ST-0378, with the complete documentation pack in place before it can be deployed; the same equipment also needs LEEA/LOLER inspection and certification records maintained, on top of the ISO 9001 traceability that runs through every job. In practice those records are compiled from spreadsheets and folders at the end of a job: design and proof-load results in one place, lifting-inspection certificates in another, material traceability in a third, stitched into a dossier item by item, error-prone and repeated on every package. The certification burden is a data-integration problem wearing a compliance hat: the facts exist, they just live in systems that were never asked to assemble them into the document the standard demands.
Asset, Inspection and Recertification Records With No Single Owner
The same scatter follows the equipment after it leaves the quay. Inspection, recertification and maintenance records for lifting gear, gangways and subsea equipment sit outside any one system, so there is no single view of what is due, what is currently certified, and what has lapsed. For a firm whose products carry mandatory periodic inspection, that is not an administrative nuisance. It is the difference between a clean audit and a piece of kit that cannot legally be used until it is recertified.
This is the same pressure visible in the firms that are actually growing here. DME Systems, a Tyneside subsea steel and equipment fabricator, grew from 16 to 25 staff and expanded its premises on the back of new work. Osbit, the subsea and offshore-access engineer behind bespoke systems like the MaXccess walk-to-work gangway supplied to a Subsea 7 project, delivers internationally from a Tyneside base. Firms scaling like that feel the asset-and-cert problem hardest, because the manual reconciliation that just about held at one project a quarter does not hold when the slate fills up.
What We Build Around Your Project, MRP and Compliance Systems
None of these tools needs replacing. Primavera, Sage, SolidWorks and your inspection records are each doing their job. The work sits in the gaps between them, so a figure entered once on the project side shows up everywhere it is needed, including in the dossier that has to ship with the kit. In practice that breaks down into a handful of connectors:
- Integrations linking the project schedule (Primavera P6, Microsoft Project) to the ERP/MRP and accounts (Sage 200, 123Insight, IFS), so cost-against-budget and milestone status come from live data instead of a manual reconciliation. This is our core API integration work.
- A design-to-shop-floor connector that keeps the SolidWorks design store, the bill of materials and the works orders aligned, so a revision propagates instead of being rekeyed.
- An automated certification-dossier builder that pulls DNV-ST-0378 design and proof-load records, LEEA/LOLER lifting certificates and ISO 9001 traceability into the per-item package the standard requires, assembled as the job runs rather than reconstructed at the end.
- An asset and recertification register that gives one live view of every piece of lifting and subsea equipment: what is certified, what is due, and what has lapsed.
- Field-to-office capture so test results, install records and sign-offs taken offshore or on the quay land in the office systems once, rather than being re-entered by hand.
This is custom software development for an engineering sector that does not employ developers and has no wish to: standards move, packages change shape, and the integration layer needs maintaining alongside the work. Most firms here want an ongoing partner rather than a one-off build handed over and abandoned.
Working in the Tyne Energy Cluster?
The fastest way to scope a first piece of work is to pick one recently shipped package and lay its cert dossier next to its project file: every figure, certificate or test result that had to be copied by hand from one system into that pack is a cost and a compliance exposure we can design out. Show us the documentation pack your last job had to ship with and we will start with the records that take the most manual assembly off your team. Offshore energy is the anchor of our Newcastle work.
