Most offshore wind O&M contracts involve at least three organisations working on the same turbines, arrays or substations within a given week — the asset owner, a marine coordination contractor, and one or more specialist O&M providers. Add a vessel with intermittent signal, a control room onshore, and a technician standing in a nacelle with no signal at all, and the control of work system has to do more than digitise a paper permit. It has to keep working when the network doesn't.
Most of what's published on choosing control of work software reads like it was written by whoever's selling it. This isn't that. It's a set of criteria and questions worth putting in front of any vendor, built around the constraints that are specific to offshore wind rather than generic to enterprise software.
What control of work software actually needs to do offshore
Control of work software for offshore wind needs to manage permits, isolations and simultaneous operations across multiple contracting organisations, on assets that may have no live connectivity for hours or days at a time, while producing an audit trail that satisfies the asset owner, the regulator and the insurer. Anything less is a permit form with a login screen.
That's the standard to evaluate against. The rest of this checklist breaks it into the things you can actually test during procurement.
Connectivity resilience: what happens with no signal
A technician boarding a turbine by transfer vessel may have no signal for the whole shift. If the permit system requires a live connection to issue, accept, or close a permit, either the work stops or the crew works around the system — neither is acceptable, and neither is hypothetical on a working array.
Ask the vendor to demonstrate offline permit issue and acceptance on a device with the network switched off, and to show what happens on reconnection: does the system sync cleanly, does it flag conflicts if two people tried to act on the same permit while both were offline, and does the audit trail show the actual time of action rather than the time of sync. Ask what happens if a device is lost or damaged before it reconnects — is there any way to recover the work that was in progress.
Multi-organisation access control
Arrays are rarely worked by a single contractor. A cable fault might have the asset owner, a marine coordination company, a specialist cable repair contractor and the O&M provider all needing visibility of the same isolation at once, each with different levels of access and different authorisation limits.
Ask how the system handles a contractor workforce that changes month to month — does adding or removing an organisation's access require a configuration change by the vendor, or can the asset owner manage it directly. Ask to see how permit acceptance and area authority sign-off work when the accepting party and the issuing party are employed by different companies with different competency frameworks. We've written before about the competency gap this can expose on contractor permit management, and it applies as much to a turbine platform as to a fixed installation.
Integration depth, not feature lists
A control of work system that sits next to the CMMS, the competency record, and the marine coordination or weather system — rather than inside them — creates exactly the kind of duplicate record-keeping it's meant to remove. Feature lists rarely tell you how deep the integration actually goes.
Ask specifically: does a work order raised in the CMMS create the associated permit automatically, or does someone re-key it. Does the system check a technician's training and competency record before permit acceptance is allowed, or is that check manual. Does a marine or weather constraint that would prevent safe transfer to a turbine actually block permit issue, or is that judgement left entirely to the person on the vessel. None of these need to be perfect out of the box, but a vendor should be able to show you exactly where the integration stops and manual process picks up. We've covered the mechanics of this kind of integration in more depth in connecting the control of work system.
Auditability and reporting
Regulators and insurers reviewing an offshore wind asset want to see that permits, isolations and SIMOPS decisions can be reconstructed after the fact — not just that a record exists, but that it shows what the situation actually was at the time.
Ask to see the full history of a permit that's been amended, extended or suspended, including who changed it and when. Ask whether the system can produce a report showing every permit and isolation live on an asset at a given point in the past, not just currently. Ask how far back records go and whether that retention period is configurable to match your safety case or your insurer's requirements — this is a question worth putting to the vendor directly rather than assuming a default setting will do.
Implementation across vessels, ports and control rooms
A workforce split across CTVs, port-based teams and an onshore control room needs a rollout plan that accounts for where devices actually get used, not just where the software gets installed. Ask the vendor how training is delivered for a distributed and often transient contractor workforce, what happens when a new contracting organisation joins mid-contract, and how long a realistic implementation takes for an array already in operation rather than one built from scratch.
A structured permit to work buyer's guide covers procurement questions that apply more broadly across the energy sector; the points above are the ones specific to working offshore on turbines and arrays.
Turning this into an RFP
A short set of questions worth including directly in a request for proposal:
- Demonstrate permit issue, acceptance and closure with the device offline, then show the sync behaviour on reconnection.
- Show how access is granted to a new contracting organisation without vendor involvement.
- Show the complete history of an amended permit, including timestamps and the person responsible for each change.
- Show how the system would flag a conflict between two permits issued for the same isolation on the same turbine.
- Confirm what data the CMMS, competency system and marine coordination tools actually exchange with the platform, and what still requires manual entry.
None of this replaces a proper technical evaluation against your own asset configuration, but it should surface the gaps that a feature list won't show you.
If you're building a procurement scorecard for an offshore wind array or O&M contract, we can talk through where our control of work software fits against these criteria — and, just as usefully, where it doesn't.