Get the right access rights!

On 11 May, a major change concerning the requirements to access the CERN beam facilities was put in place and implemented in ADaMS in order to reduce the number of courses that people who need access to multiple installations have to follow. This revision includes dedicated safety training courses that replace, in particular, the “Safety during LS1” e-learning course, which is now to be considered obsolete.

 

CERN’s Access Distribution and Management System (ADaMS).

As of 11 May, an important improvement was implemented in ADaMS (CERN’s Access Distribution and Management System) regarding the requisites to access safety zones. This change is closely related to the introduction of a generic e-learning course ("CERN Beam Facilities") covering the common risks and systems present in CERN's beam facilities. Two e-learning courses are no longer valid, nor available on the SIR (Safety Information Registration) catalogue: the “Safety during LS1” and the “PS Complex (Level 4 PS)” training courses. The main objective of this revision is to develop dedicated learning modules addressing specific risks, thus avoiding redundancies among different courses.

This change has involved teams from GS-ASE, the HSE Safety Training section and the BE department’s Safety Unit. In addition to the new courses, the new scheme also benefits from the introduction of the ADaMS “training ranks” system that was put in place by GS-AIS at the beginning of the year, concerning both e-learning and face-to-face courses. “Before February 2015, to access a safety zone, one or more courses were required. At present, one or more “ranks” are required instead, and they can still be obtained by following training courses,” explains Rui Nunes, GS-ASE-AC section leader. For the end user, i.e. the learner, the courses followed are translated into “acquired ranks” and no access authorisations will be lost.

One or more courses may grant the same rank, because they belong to the same “family”. Before introducing this rank system, the access conditions were directly related to a course name. The smallest upgrade - like changing the colours in the slides of a course - corresponded to a new course, therefore requiring (unnecessary) new training, even when the one already taken had not yet expired. “A training rank enables us to manage equivalencies between courses. For example, while previously the Self Rescue Mask Initial and Refresher courses and their French versions were considered by ADaMS to be four different courses, with the new system they all belong to rank 10390,” says Christoph Balle, Safety Training section leader. The same rank may be obtained by different courses (for example a refresher course), thus allowing greater flexibility for the management of the training catalogue and the access system, as well as for the learner.

“This switch concerns  only the accelerator zones for the time being, but a new phase will start at the beginning of June,” explains Christelle Gaignant, BE Deputy Departmental Safety Officer. From then and progressively until August, the change will be applied to the remaining zones starting with the LHC experiments, according to the calendars agreed at the different Complex Safety Advisory Panels (CSAP). “In order to have their access granted, I encourage the users to anticipate their required training, referring either to ADaMS or the BE Safety webpage,” she concludes.


*To know which dedicated courses you have to follow in order to have your accesses granted, please refer to the ADaMS webpage.

by Rosaria Marraffino