Participants and Signatures

A Risk Assessment can record the people who took part in creating or reviewing it, together with their digital signature. Each participant appears on the Risk Assessment report with name, role and — once signed — the signature and the date it was given.

A signature can either be written on a connected signature pad or loaded from an image file. For ZeeBORN users who already have a signature stored in their user profile, it can be taken over automatically.

Making the function available

The function is switched on per installation and is hidden until it is enabled — if none of the ways described below are there, this is the first thing to check.

1. Go to Risk Assessment > Configuration > Risk Assessment Configuration.
2. Scroll to the Participant Signatures section at the bottom of the page.
3. Tick the options you need:

Option	Meaning
Enable participant signature capture for Risk Assessments	Required. Without it every way of reaching the participant list stays hidden.
Require at least one signed participant when approving	Optional. A Risk Assessment can then only be approved once at least one participant has signed.
Auto-use stored user signature … when adding a system user	Optional. When a ZeeBORN user is added as participant and has a signature in their user profile, that signature is taken over at once — nothing has to be signed or loaded.

4. Close the Risk Assessment module and open it again, otherwise the entries do not appear.

Opening the participant list

Three ways lead to the same window — use whichever is closest to hand. All of them require the right to edit Risk Assessments.

Where to find it	How
Overview of an assessment	The Participants card on the right states how many people are recorded and carries an Add / edit participants button. The card is shown even when nobody has been added yet, so it also works as a reminder.
Edit window	The Participants tab, next to Further Actions and Authorization.
Ribbon	More Actions > Participants & Signatures, at the bottom of the list.

Two exceptions are worth knowing. Templates have no participants, so neither the card nor the tab appears on them. And on an assessment that is being created for the first time, the tab appears only after the first save — abandoning a new assessment discards it altogether, participants included.

Adding participants

Open the participant list as described above. There are three ways to add someone, and they can be mixed in the same assessment:

Button	Use it for
Add from Crewlist	A crew member. The role is prefilled with their job title and can be overwritten — useful for roles such as a witness.
Add from Users	A ZeeBORN user. The role is prefilled from the user's master data. If the option for stored signatures is switched on, the signature is taken over immediately.
Add by Name	Anyone else, entered as free text — inspectors, contractors or visitors who are not in the system.

Recording a signature

Select the participant in the list and click Capture Signature. The signature window offers both ways:

• On a signature pad — click Capture from pad, hand the pad over, and finish with Stop & Save. Abort cancels the attempt.
• From an image file — click Load from file... and pick the image. Use this on workstations without a pad. A PNG with a transparent background gives the best result; if the image has a solid background, the signature is taken out of it automatically.

A signature loaded from a file is stored in exactly the same way as one written on the pad. For which pads are supported, see Signatures.

When Capture from pad stays greyed out

The button says itself what is wrong: hover over it, and the reason appears. There are three of them, and they call for different things:

Hint on the button	What it means	What to do
signotec driver not installed	The signotec software is not registered on this workstation. In this case the program does not even look for hardware - so a pad that is plugged in and working changes nothing.	Install the signotec software on that workstation. If it is already installed, it was probably set up without administrator rights and has to be registered again.
No signature pad connected	The software is there, but no device answered.	Check the cable and the pad itself.
signotec OCX error	The software is registered but could not be loaded.	Usually a broken or half-finished installation - install it again.

It depends on the workstation, not on the user or the vessel. The same person finds the button working on a different machine. Nothing has to be changed in ZeeBORN for it - no setting, no restart of the server: once the software is in place, the button is active the next time the signature window is opened.

The pad is looked for when the window opens, so a pad that is plugged in afterwards is only found after closing and reopening the window.

Correcting an entry

Button	Effect
Clear Signature	Keeps the participant but removes the signature, so it can be given again.
Remove Participant	Removes the entry completely, including any signature. The removal reaches the vessels with the next regular data transfer.

On the report

The Risk Assessment report shows a Participants card listing every participant with name, role, signature and signing date. Participants who have not signed are marked as not signed.

Worth knowing

When Risk Assessments are approved in a batch after an import, the rule requiring at least one signed participant is deliberately not applied. If the rule has to hold for every approval without exception, approve those Risk Assessments individually.