Challenge
Donut Safety Systems are established market leaders in the development and manufacture of personal escape descent devices, with tens of thousands of units in service across offshore oil and gas, marine, renewables, ports and construction. Every unit carries a training requirement behind it: user training for the personnel who may have to deploy a device, and a two-day instructor course for those certified to deliver it onsite and offshore. The entire operation ran on paper. Bookings, cancellations, registration forms, certification, instructor records and the commercial pipeline were all handled by hand, across a training facility in Aberdeen and a global network of approved providers, with scheduling done over email and phone. The challenge was to replace all of it with one system covering the full lifecycle, from a client choosing a course to a certificate landing in a candidate’s inbox, without losing the audit trail a safety-critical product demands.
Objectives
Give clients a self-serve portal to select a course, book an available slot and pay at the point of booking, with cancellation and refund terms applied by the system rather than negotiated case by case. Carry candidates through the whole day in their own portal: registration and pre-course forms, the assessment taken and marked on the platform, and a certificate generated and issued automatically on a pass. Build the e-learning platform itself, so the theory element of user training can be delivered online and credited against an instructor’s allocation, with practical assessment still taking place face to face.
Equip certified trainers with an instructor portal holding their training documentation and audit templates, managing their trainees and assigning e-learning ahead of a practical session. Give internal staff a full administrative back end covering the booking calendar, instructor and user management, payments and certification. Protect every account type with two-factor authentication, appropriate to a platform holding certification evidence for regulated work. Alongside the training platform, build a CRM for the manufacturing side of the business, tracking device sales opportunities through customised fields, automations and rules, with invoicing for physical Donut units raised in the same place.
Solution and Impact
The training platform is one system with four connected front doors; client, candidate, instructor and internal admin, sitting on a shared LMS, with a separate CRM running the manufacturing arm. A booking made and paid for in the client portal creates the course instance on the admin calendar. Candidates attached to that booking get their own logins for form completion on the day. A pass on the day triggers certification with no administrative step in between. Instructors can assign e-learning courses and access all the information they need.
The result is a training operation that runs itself where it used to run on staff time. Clients book and pay at any hour, candidates leave the same day holding a certificate, and the instructor network that lets Donut deliver training worldwide without adding internal overhead runs smoothly. Every booking, candidate, certificate and payment now carries an audit trail, which matters for a product whose approvals depend on demonstrable training compliance. On the manufacturing side, the CRM gives the same single view of device sales, from first opportunity through to the invoice for the units themselves.