UK: Blumano – the international design and safety specialist – has launched Stage DB, a unique new multi-lingual software tool for co-ordinating and collating all the necessary machinery and equipment documentation to meet production-related health and safety requirements.
Stage DB has been developed for Blumano by Lluis Diaz-Guerra, also one of three directors of the company, which launched in 2014. Since then Blumano has led the way in establishing important health and safety related working practices for the world of concert touring, special events and large spectaculars.
Any tour or event needs to produce a fully organised bundle of documentation including all the mandatory certificates and reports mandated by the H&S work regulations. This is often required in different languages, all of which also have to be available for inspection by local authorities.
This administrative minefield takes serious time and resources, so Stage DB is designed to make the job quicker, more logical, more cost-effective and easier once the raw data is entered into the system.
Blumano’s Cristiano Giavedoni said: “This is the first system of its kind that has been conceived and developed specifically to work within the short and often highly pressured timeframes of the live events industry”.
The project manager can create the project with start and end dates; the person overseeing the kit being loaded onto the truck can go online and drag-&-drop the relevant equipment serial numbers into the project file. From there, all the requisite documentation – the ‘project bundle’ – is pulled from the information for the countries they are visiting and compiled in a series of easily manageable PDF files.
Stage DB is packed with useful and practical features to assist the process, making it straightforward and user-friendly using a series of user-definable and selectable templates. There is the convenience of grouping items together by technical common specifications, and Group Values can be chosen and applied across each group of machinery.
Inbuilt templates will allow dates for ‘last’ and ‘next’ test examinations to be inserted and Stage DB will flag upcoming expiry dates, and not allow these pieces of kit to be allocated to a project if they are due to expire within the stipulated project timeframe.
Currently the software can produce the documentation in four languages – English, French, Spanish and Italian, with German and Dutch available soon. Blumano plans to add other languages in the future.
The programme outputs the completed ‘project bundles’ as PDFs and also generates a series of links that can be sent to the client, who can also access the relevant documentation directly from cloud storage as and when needed.
Documentation can be individually personalised with company logos and there are many more flexible and adaptable flourishes that can be added to the overall presentation of the data.
Stage DB is available on licence from Blumano. For more details, click here.
Assistance with inputting and setting up the initial company’s machinery data is also available as a service from Blumano.
Stage DB has already been beta tested by a number of very active international staging, rigging and engineering companies to ensure it is rock solid, reliable and fine-tuned for commercial release.
It has been used on Take That’s ‘Wonderland’ UK tour; for Coldplay in Milan and for Vasco Rossi’s gig in Modena Park in July, attended by 250,000 people; and on the Scorpions recent German tour. It will also be used again on aspects of the upcoming Rolling Stones tour.
