CROSS Structural Safety

CROSS (Collaborative Reporting for Safer Structures) is an acknowledged independent source of expertise for gathering and sharing information on structural safety issues to help create a safer built environment. CROSS is operated jointly by the Institutions of Civil and Structural Engineers and the new public facing website required a safety report management system to expand its remit to include reporting on fire and structural safety.

The ask

The CROSS website first went live in 2008, followed by an updated version in 2013. After the Grenfell Tower tragedy in 2017, the final report recommended that CROSS should be extended and strengthened to cover all engineering safety concerns.

CROSS wanted to create an accessible web experience that enhances the audience’s engagement while building a secure, responsive, robust, scalable, easy to upgrade and cost-effective infrastructure.

CROSS has historically had a strongly engaged audience in the structural engineering community and amongst parts of the contracting sector, local authority building control, and others in the construction industry. They wanted to broaden the demographic of their audience across the design, construction and building management sectors.

Photo of a man wearing protective glasses, looking at a screen with a futurist green glow

The approach

The discovery and alpha (design) phase of the project was undertaken by Mace & Menter and transitioned efficiently into the beta stage with our team. With a preference for Open Source, CROSS investigated various CMS options and implementation partners before selecting Drupal as the platform and Zoocha as the partner.

The user report submission process is driven through Webform with bespoke logic to extend functionality. This report then feeds into an extended version of the Workflow module to drive the safety report management system.

This project involved extensive workflow and notification personalisation by extending default Drupal workflow management functionality.

Due to legal access requirements surrounding the reports submitted to the platform (such as highly confidential whistle blowing submissions regarding building regulations breaches of materials such as cladding), our team were able to implement custom workflows that allowed content to exist in anonymised and fully accessible states in parallel, with only CROSS legal team members provided with the full access that was removed at the next step of the workflow. Notifications provided users with enough information (ensuring that redactions were implemented) to progress through the workflows without jeopardising confidentiality.

With a large volume of reports available on the site, users are able to filter between various options, with predicted search options appearing as you type and an automatic spell check. The CROSS team are able to control the visibility of the results, making certain reports only available in specific locations and promoting search results where appropriate. Furthermore, all results are marked with clear tags, ensuring the user can easily skim through results to find what they need. The CROSS website serves three separate regions each with their own domain. Content can therefore be tailored to only serve a particular region, with specific differences between the units of measurement for each region.

The results

The new website is secure, scalable, and built to handle the complex workflows needed for sensitive safety reporting. The platform offers a clear, accessible experience for users across the construction and engineering sectors while giving the CROSS team powerful tools for content management, search, and workflow control and has strengthened CROSS’s ability to deliver on its mission to improve building and structural safety.

Zoocha are always particularly proud of our work that has a tangible benefit to the wider community and our work with CROSS represents this drive.