Frustrated at seeing how time-consuming site compliance and health and safety (H&S) paperwork is, civil engineer Amien Bohwaish MCIOB promised himself that he would make his own software to simplify the process.

Having spent the past decade as site engineer, manager and now senior construction assurance manager for HS2, Bohwaish created TruSite AI as dedicated software for compliance and health and safety, and not simply an add-on.

While there are many apps and software programmes coming on to the market to simplify paperwork and allow easy capture of data on site, Bohwaish said they tended to treat compliance and H&S as extras. Yet this is an important area of work with many regulations and standards that have to be met and so requires a dedicated tool.

“When there are no incidents, everybody is relaxed and there’s no issue, and things are fine. But when an incident happens, that’s when the questions start getting asked and the microscopes get brought out – when something goes wrong.

“And a lot of the time what I find is when an incident occurs, upon inspection, upon looking through all the documentations in place – checking whether the morning briefing has been done, whether this person is trained and has the card to do that job – on many occasions, we end up finding out that one of those many documentations is either missing or it’s not been completed.

“Or, somebody’s certificate is overdue and expired, or they forgot to do certain things. So, it’s almost a common, regular occurrence.”

The increased sophistication of LLMs helped Bohwaish realise his ambition with TruSite. The AI translates and filters voice notes, photos and site data into automated workflows, reducing hours of laborious work into a few minutes.

With compliance and H&S, there are several steps that need to be completed: remember the task, carry it out, record it properly, and also file it correctly so you can find it when you may need it next, which could be months into the future. But this can be time-consuming.

Bohwaish aimed to create software that was easy for people working on site to use that did not require any technological expertise, that could could take voice notes and transcribe them into the required paperwork, and would show at a glance what needed doing.

When there is missing information and documents, it makes handover at the end of a project “very, very tough” and could mean having to dig through years of paperwork, he said. This could result in reduced accuracy and sometimes even the loss of key data due through having to backtrack.

TruSite has a simplified main interface with eight different categories – site induction, morning briefing, site diary, H&S inspections, competency log, equipment and plant, incidents log, and COSHH. Bohwaish said the latter is often omitted from more generic applications.

Bohwaish added: “This is a compliance site construction software that is easy to use, and done for the people that are building, that are busy on site and have so many things to do. Rather than, becoming a software that you need to adapt and learn, it is something that is quite easily usable.

“Everything is done in a way that it’s just a click of a button. You’ve got your modules, you’ve got your notification system, and an AI is doing the laborious work, the boring work that is populating certain sections.

“The supervisor or managers are able to review and input key information – it just makes their life easy, which makes, essentially, compliance easy. It makes it hard not to be compliant on sites because of how straightforward this is.”

There are two colour codes, red and green, with green meaning the task is up-to-date and red meaning it still needs to be done. The TruSite software also takes all of the logged and required data, including any incidents or near misses, and combines this with legislation and guidance to help create a weekly ToolBox Talk.

The software has been trialled with two contractors, a main contractor/residential developer and an infrastructure subcontractor, and has been reviewed by two senior level H&S directors. It is compatible with Microsoft and Apple and can be used on mobile devices. Once the software is downloaded, the user then pays a subscription to use it.

TruSite will be at Digital Construction Week in June.