About the client

Seafish is a UK public body supporting the £10bn seafood industry, working with government and industry to ensure seafood is responsibly sourced, safely handled and sustainably managed. As part of its remit, Seafish maintains records of training and certification for fishermen, ensuring compliance with strict safety regulations.

The challenge

Seafish had been using a legacy Microsoft Access database to store details of fishing workers and their training records. This system was outdated and created a number of operational and compliance challenges:

• Heavy reliance on manual data entry, increasing errors and administrative workload.
• Lack of intuitive navigation and poor user interface, making day-to-day use cumbersome.
• No external access for key partners such as the Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) or approved training providers.
• Limited security, with no two-factor authentication or field-level permissions.
• Complex and unreliable backup processes.
• Limited reporting, making it difficult to generate consistent outputs for regulators and stakeholders.

Seafish therefore required a modern, secure and scalable system to centralise training records, improve data integrity and support future growth.

The solution

Hero Solutions worked with Seafish to design and deliver a bespoke candidate and training management system with the following key features:

• Multi-portal access: secure portals for Seafish, MCA staff and Approved Training Providers (ATPs).

• Advanced security: user-level permissions, two-factor authentication, IP whitelisting, encryption at rest, audit logging and GDPR compliance.
• Candidate management: detailed records of fishermen’s courses, ID cards, MCA certificates and fishing experience, with full history tracking and soft-deletion safeguards.
• Training provider tools: ATPs can manage courses and events, upload attendance and result documents and input candidate results directly.
• Course results workflow: structured processes for entering, verifying and reporting training outcomes, ensuring integrity and reducing errors.
• Reporting suite: flexible reports on training days, training places, course refreshers and ATP performance, output in consistent Excel or graphical formats.
• Data migration: transfer of over 80,000 candidate records and 240,000 course completions from the legacy database, with integrity maintained.
• Scalability: capacity to handle up to 160,000 candidates and 1 million completed courses.

The impact

• Hero has delivered a modern, intuitive platform that significantly reduces manual data handling.
• Robust compliance with industry regulations and government standards has been ensured.
• Efficiency has improved for Seafish staff, MCA administrators and training providers.
• Security has been strengthened with industry-standard protections against cyber threats.
• Real-time access has been provided to accurate, validated training records, enhancing trust across the seafood sector.
• A scalable foundation to support Seafish’s future digital transformation has been established.