The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) has upgraded its health, safety and environmental information systems to a new WAN Intranet based system from Technical Indexes.

One of Europe’s largest research organisations, with a turnover of approximately £1 billion, DERA is an agency of the UK Ministry of Defence dispersed over more than 30 sites throughout the country. It incorporates the bulk of the UK Ministry of Defence’s non nuclear research, technology and test and evaluation establishments and employs many of the country’s leading scientists, engineers and internationally acclaimed experts in their field.

It offers a unique range of services, from the highest level of operational studies and analysis, through the various categories of basic and applied research, to consultancy advice on the procurement process and the test and evaluation of specific equipment in both development phases and during actual operations.

DERA has purchased 10 OHSIS and 5 Environment licences from Technical Indexes to run on their intranet system, replacing a number of older stand alone systems that were also supplied by ti.

OHSIS (Occupational Health & Safety Information Service) includes the most recent updates to key Health & Safety legislation relevant to products and workplaces, while the environmental information service provides those responsible for environmental issues with a full-text database of UK and EC regulations and guidelines.

Users of the new system are all Health and Safety advisors from various DERA locations, who use the information to advise on a wide range of health and safety requirements ranging from general fire safety to the use of lasers in research work.

The system runs as part of the company’s Intranet but is actually housed on a separate server. Using the information on a WAN network is more cost effective than the old stand alone systems and licensed users are given a password which allows instant access to the information they need while preventing unauthorised users from logging on.

Gerry Sweeny, DERA’s Farnborough based Health, Safety and Environmental Advisor said: "The new Intranet system gives us perfect consistency of information between our various locations. For example, our division at Pyestock can quote a particular document and this can be instantly retrieved at all our other locations. This is a vast improvement over our previous stand-alone systems and over the hard copy microfiche information we used prior to that.

We were also pleased to discover a number of useful documents on the new system that were previously unknown to us. These included a Fire Risk Assessment Checklist from the Fire Protection Association and we now use the guidance document annex from this as DERA’s standard checklist for fire procedures."

For companies such as DERA, Technical Indexes is the leading provider of comprehensive, technical data, standards, regulations, product and supplier information.

The only company of its type with an ISO 9002 quality accreditation, more than 6,000 customers in the UK alone retain their competitive edge by referring to the several million pages of vital information supplied by ti.