The Security Incident Reporting System (SIRS) provides a means for recording incidents of theft of metal and other incidents, primarily on the electricity network but also on telecoms networks. The system was commissioned by the Security Task Group (STG) in 2008 and is managed by the Energy Networks Association (ENA), which provides a range of services to its members from the Electricity and Gas generation, transmission and supply industries. The system consists of a .NET web application with a SQL Server database and is integrated with several third party components, which convert HTML to PDF and bundle incident files (the PDF and any other files uploaded with the incident including photos, police reports etc) into a single zip file in order to facilitate data storage and sharing.

The system has several hundred users including representatives from all UK police forces. It is used very extensively by British Transport Police. Approximately 20 incidents are submitted to the system each weekday.

The system was originally envisaged as an intelligence tool for security managers and law enforcement agencies and was designed to encourage users to input a range of detail about each incident. This worked well but the sheer volume of incidents being reported hadn’t been anticipated at the outset and those organisations suffering the largest number of incidents found it difficult to resource data input. The STG therefore approached PowerDev to streamline the system by simplifying the data entry of the most commonly reported metal theft incidents and by providing a bulk upload mechanism. The bulk upload allows users to extract data from internal systems, validate it and upload to the server where it is picked up by a scheduled process and appended to the live data. These changes were implemented on the live system over the weekend of 8/9 March 2014 to the considerable relief of a number of users.