UK-based international entertainment industry engineering design and safety specialists and consultants BLUMANO Ltd has launched Stage DB – a unique new multi-lingual software tool for co-ordinating and collating all the necessary machinery / equipment documentation to meet production 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 veritable minefield of administration takes serious time and resources, so Stage DB is designed to make the job infinitely quicker, logical, more cost-effective and easier once the raw data is entered into the system.
BLUMANO’s Cristiano Giavedoni comments: “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 concert, show and event industry.”
The project manager can create the project with start/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.
In-built 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 and other languages due to be added.
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. This is a helpful alternative to sending large PDFs over Email for the on-the-road community. 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 check out: www.blumano.com/stageDB Assistance with inputting and setting up the initial company’s machinery data is also available as a service from BLUMANO.
Available now, Stage DB has been beta tested by a number of very active international staging, rigging and engineering companies to ensure reliability. It has been used on Take That’s Wonderland UK tour, for Coldplay in Milan and for Vasco Rossi’s monster gig in Modena Park in July, attended by 250,000 people and on the Rolling Stones current tour. In each instance, the productions and the local authorities were all “very happy with the results”.
