Work permit — risk assessment (step 0)

You assess the job first, and the assessment tells you which permit (or permits) it needs and under what mandatory conditions. The process no longer starts by picking a permit type out of habit, but by walking through the hazards of the job — and the assessment’s trail stays on every permit started from it.

Before you start

• Permission: creating and approving a risk assessment — ptw:assess. Creating the permit drafts needs ptw:request or ptw:issue.
• Prerequisite: the Work permit module is enabled for your organisation, and you know the site and plant where the job will take place.

Step 0 is a capability, not a switch

The Risk assessment menu entry is there even when your organisation’s policy does not ask for one. The policy controls whether a permit may start without an assessment: off by default, but the organisation can set it to recommended or mandatory. On mandatory, the “New permit” page does not show a template picker — it sends you here.

Steps

1. Open Permits → Risk assessment and click “New risk assessment”. Pick the site and the plant, and give the job a title. The system assigns a KE- number and takes you straight to the questionnaire.

2. Fill in the basics. Description of the job is YOUR text — the questionnaire does not replace it. The requesting company, the work supervisor, the place, the planned window and the headcount belong here too.

3. Work through the questionnaire. Questions come in sections: site-side and activity-side hazards are tick boxes, while material properties and circumstances (for example the Ex zone) are answered in their own sections. A question marked with a star is mandatory; the sticky bar at the bottom always shows what is still missing, and clicking a missing item jumps to it.

4. If your organisation asks for it, fill in the job safety analysis (step table). Per row: the step, what can go wrong, who or what can be harmed, the control, the owner and the reference. Rows can be added and deleted; the table is a grid on desktop and one card per row on a phone.

5. Watch the live prescription in the right-hand panel (on a phone, the sheet that slides up from the bottom). As you answer, the panel shows which permits the assessment prescribes, with which markers, gates, required and recommended PPE, minimum headcount and conditions. Next to every item, ⓘ tells you which rule put it there.

6. Click “Approve”. The confirmation dialog lists what you are freezing. After approval the assessment cannot be edited: this frozen prescription is what the permits will carry.

7. Create the permit drafts. On an approved assessment, “Create permit drafts” opens one draft per prescribed permit type and reports each one: created, already existed, or no template for it in your organisation. The button is repeatable: a second run creates no duplicates.

Several questions ask about the same hazard

That is deliberate: the same hazard can appear on the site side and on the activity side. The engine counts it once — answer both honestly.

On the permit: locked and recommended items

A permit draft created from an assessment shows two markings:

• 🔒 required — prescribed by the risk assessment. You can remove it, but only with a reason: unticking opens a reason field, and without a reason the save does not go through. The reason goes into the permanent trail (who stated it and when), and issuing is blocked while it is missing.
• ✧ recommended — suggested by the risk assessment. You may remove it freely; no reason, no trace.

Where the assessment made a declaration mandatory, “not applicable” is not available — the answer may be “no”, but it has to be answered. The card at the top of the permit summarises which assessment it started from, who assessed it, when it was approved, and which deviations were recorded.

When it worked

After approval the assessment header reads “Approved”, and the “Verify” button states that the content fingerprint matches what is stored. The permits created from it are listed at the bottom with their number and status, and each carries the KE- number.

The printable copy

• On the assessment page, the PDF button gives the assessment’s own, standalone PDF: basics, the full questionnaire with the answers, the step table and the PPE matrix (whichever your organisation asks for), the prescription per permit, and the signature block with the approval time and the content fingerprint. On an unapproved assessment the paper states at the top that it is a draft.
• On the permit page, next to the usual PDF there is a second download: “Download with the risk assessment attached”. This gives ONE file — the permit, then the assessment from a new page. Useful when a single printed pack goes to the site. The appendix is a printing convenience: the authoritative copies remain the permit’s own PDF and the assessment’s own PDF.

Common problems

What you see	Why	What to do
“Approval did not start: saving the draft failed.”	We save the page before approving; that save failed (network, expired session).	Check your connection, save the page and try again. We can only freeze an assessment that is saved.
“No permit prescribed.”	No rule prescribed a permit from your answers, and no base permit is configured.	Review the answers, or add the permit you need by hand in the panel’s “Add permit” field.
A prescribed permit is DISABLED with “no such active template”	The assessment prescribes a permit type your organisation has no (active) template for.	An administrator can install or activate it under Permits → Settings → Base templates.
Not a single item is pre-ticked on the draft	The template items are missing the catalogue references (ref) — typically because the templates were installed before the risk catalogue.	An administrator should run the Update base templates step (see below).

For administrators: editing the questionnaire and the rules

The questionnaire, the PPE–control vocabulary and the “what prescribes what” mapping are not hard-coded: your organisation can edit them.

1. Permits → Settings → Risk catalogue. Until you have your own catalogue, the built-in content is used. “Install built-in catalogue” creates a copy of the built-in content for you — from then on you can rewrite it freely, and built-in updates only bring NEW entries.

2. Editing. The editor sets whether the organisation issues separate permits or one combined permit (in which case rules do not prescribe separate permits, they open the boxes of the single permit), which permit is the base permit, whether a step table is used, and whether you ask for PPE by body part. Sections and items, the vocabulary and the rules each have their own tab. Every rule needs a reason — that is what the user reads under ⓘ.

3. The “Update base templates” onboarding step. The assessment floor rests on the references (ref) of the template items. If your templates were installed earlier, those references only reach your templates after Permits → Settings → Base templates → “Update base templates”. Until you run it, a permit started from an assessment gets no pre-ticked items. The page says so after a catalogue install or merge, and offers the step.

Your own, company-specific templates

The update brings the references onto the built-in templates. On a template of your own (for example your combined permit) the references have to be added to the items in the template editor — until then the requirement is rendered as a text condition rather than a tick. That is not a failure: the requirement is not lost, it simply is not shown as a checkbox.

Worth knowing

• An approved assessment is immutable. If the job changes, copy it as a draft, correct it and approve it again — permits already issued carry the old assessment, because that was the basis of the decision.
• The system never fills in a declaration for you. An assessment can make a declaration mandatory, but a person gives the answer.
• The assessment does not copy history. If you start from a copy, the page warns you to review it: the answers of an earlier job are not the answers of this one.