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 the button described below is missing, this is the first thing to check.

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

Option	Meaning
Enable participant signature capture for Risk Assessments	Required. Without it the `Participants & Signatures` button 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.

Close the Risk Assessment module and open it again, otherwise the button does not appear.

Adding participants

Open a Risk Assessment.
Click Participants & Signatures in the ribbon.
Add the participants. There are three ways, 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.

The button for the pad is only available when a supported pad is actually connected. If it is greyed out, hovering over it explains why — no pad connected, or the driver is not installed. 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.

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.

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.