The Ultimate Guide to Electronic Permit to Work (ePTW) Systems

An electronic permit to work system — often written as e permit to work systems or ePTW — replaces the clipboard, triplicate carbon, and signature box with a digital workflow. Permits are raised, risk-assessed, authorised, issued, suspended, and closed inside one auditable record. Isolations, gas tests, simultaneous operations (SIMOPS) checks, and cross-discipline sign-offs are linked to the permit rather than filed in a binder on the control-room desk.

The category overlaps with what asset owners call an integrated safe system of work (ISSOW): permits, isolations, risk assessments, and task-level controls running on one platform so a permit cannot be issued if a required isolation is not in place, and an isolation cannot be removed while a dependent permit is live.

• Audit speed. Regulator and internal-audit requests that used to take days of binder digging are answered in minutes — every permit, isolation, and signature is timestamped and searchable.
• Issue speed. A contractor crew waiting at the gate is expensive. ePTW lets the permit issuer review, challenge, and approve from a tablet, not a queue at the permit office window.
• Live site visibility. A control-room display of active permits, isolations, and SIMOPS conflicts — impossible on paper — becomes the default view.
• Conflict detection. The system blocks two crews from working on the same equipment, or hot work next to an open process line, before the permit is issued rather than after the incident.
• Handover quality. Shift change carries the full live state of every permit, not a marker-board summary.

• Configurable permit types — hot work, cold work, confined space, working at height, excavation, electrical isolation. Your site's PTW manual, not the vendor's, should drive the form.
• Linked isolations. Lock-out / tag-out records attached to the permit, with the LOTO state enforced at issue and close.
• Offline capable. Process plants have dead zones. The field app needs to work without signal and reconcile when it reconnects.
• Role-based authorisation. Issuer, performing authority, area authority, and gas tester all sign in their own role — not on each other's behalf.
• Audit export. Every permit exportable as a signed PDF the regulator will accept, plus a full audit log for incident investigation.
• Multi-site rollup. If you run more than one asset, one dashboard across all of them — not one login per site.

iZOLO is an electronic permit to work platform built for industrial sites — designed around the way oil & gas operations actually run permits, isolations, and SIMOPS rather than a generic EHS workflow tool retrofitted for the field.

• Permits, isolations, and risk assessments live on one record, so the ISSOW rules — no permit without its isolation, no isolation removal while a dependent permit is live — are enforced by the system rather than by procedure.
• Per-site pricing with a free Starter tier, so a single asset can pilot ePTW without a six-month procurement cycle. See pricing for the tiers.
• Built-in PDF export and full audit log on the Professional tier upwards, sized for a regulator or internal-audit response.
• Multi-site dashboard on Operations, so a regional HSE manager sees every active permit across every asset on one screen.

1. Digitise your existing permit forms as-is — do not redesign the PTW manual and the tool at the same time.
2. Run paper and ePTW in parallel for two to four weeks on one area or one shift, with the paper copy as the legal record.
3. Cut over by area, not site-wide on day one. Confined space and hot work first — that's where the audit value lands.
4. Retire the paper copy only when issuers, performing authorities, and area authorities are all signing in their own role without prompting.