Case Study - Transocean Training Website and CDROM

For eleven years until the end of October 2009 I held the position of Software Development Manager at a leading Health & Safety Consultancy, namely Sypol Limited . Their leading product that they sell is CMS (COSHH Management System), a powerful application that manages the use substances, or products that contain mixtures of substances that could cause harm to people working within the organisation, including contractors and other people. COSHH stands for Control of Substances Hazardous to Health and all organisations working in the UK must comply with the COSHH regulations. COSHH covers all chemicals, products containing chemicals, fumes, dusts, vapours, mists and gases, biological agents and asphyxiating gases. It does not cover working with radioactive materials or asbestos as these are subject to their own specific regulations.

I was primarily responsible for developing CMS and in 2003 the Windows version that I had written reached the finals of the BCS Awards. This was no mean feat. Since then the application has gone from strength to strength and I managed the software team that transformed the Windows application that I had written to a web-based system and it has undergone major changes during my last year at the company and since then.

In 2008 CMS was sold to Transocean as part of a tender, on condition that Sypol supplied an e-learning training package. Transocean, is the world’s largest offshore drilling contractor, provides the most versatile fleet of mobile offshore drilling units to help clients find and develop oil and natural gas reserves. Incidently, CMS is being used by many oil companies as this list shows. So with Transocean being the big daddy of them all, it was very important to get it right and guess who was tasked to provide a solution. It was a welcome challenge. The criteria was:

  • Look like and have the branding of the Transocean Website
  • It had to be a Web-Based e-learning program
  • A CDROM based e-learning system was required also
  • Must have training videos of the software showing functions

Sypol Website


Sypol website that I developed in 2008, which went live in January 2009

I have been developing websites for many years and in fact in 2008 I had and at that time developed the Sypol Website. At the annual company L&D Awards meal, I was given a prize for the website, so producing a website that matched the branding and layout of the Transocean website did not pose a problem. The website has a Flash introduction to the company and with permission I downloaded it for use with the e-learning system that I was developing. It did not take me long to create a website that looked like that of Transocean website.

It should be noted that just before I left the company, Sypol was acquired by Sovereign Capital and during the acquisition process Sypol went through a new branding exercise and with the knowledge of my relocation a third-party was used to re-develop the website. So the website that you see today is not the one that I created, although I was initially involved in some of the early work developing the new CMS based website.

Web-Based e-learning Training Website for Transcoean

I created the transocean training website to look like their own website. Here you can compare and judge for yourself. They have since changed the flash presentation and added a new menu system above it, but at the time of creating their training site, the flash presentation and layout was the same as the one I had created. In the first screen shot you can see their original site via "The Wayback Machine"

Original Site as logged
by the Wayback Machine
The training site that
I created for Transocean
Transocean's New Site

CDROM based e-learning system

Rather than re-invent the egg, it made sense to use the web-based system that I had developed and transpose it on to a CD-ROM. The only problem was that one could not rely on the availability of a web-browser being present, but fortunately, I had developed a windows browser that I had incorporated in the CMS system. This I adapted and branded for Transocean and created a CD-ROM with the pages that I had created for the training website. These were supplied and it meant that if CMS users could be taught in a training enviroment without having to be online. Brillant!