SLS Beach Management

The Challenge

Australia has thousands of beaches, and for each one somebody has to be able to say — in writing, and defensibly — how safe it is and what should be done about it. That assessment is Surf Life Saving's work. The people who act on it are the councils and land managers who own the beach.

Doing it properly needs two things that are easy to get wrong together. The first is an accurate record of what is physically at each location: access ways, signage, viewing platforms, rescue equipment, the hazards themselves. The second is a consistent process for assessing that record, so two assessors at two beaches produce work of the same standard.

Spreadsheets and word processors can hold the first. They cannot enforce the second — and across hundreds of locations and multiple states, the second is what determines whether the output is worth anything.

The Solution

Nano Solutions built and operates Beach Management (BM) — the internal Laravel and Vue platform Surf Life Saving uses to run formal beach safety assessment nationally.

BM holds both halves of the problem. It describes the assessed environment — beaches and the objects at them, typed through a maintained taxonomy so a hazard sign is the same category of thing in every state — and it runs the assessments against that description, through to the report that gets issued.

Where it sits in the estate

• SLSA BeachSafe — the public platform, used by millions of beach-goers
• SLSA Operations App — the field tool patrols run their shift on
• Beach Management — where beaches are formally assessed and reported on

One shared view of the coastline, three different jobs done against it.

Built for the field, including no network

Assessment happens at the beach, which routinely means no usable signal. BM carries a downloadable map and an explicit offline mode, alongside a Capacitor-based mobile companion, so findings are captured at the point of observation rather than reconstructed from notes afterwards.

Connected rather than standalone

Sign-on runs against Surf Life Saving's national membership systems, so an assessor is a known member carrying the permissions their role gives them, not a local account somebody set up. Beach and organisational records are shared with the rest of the estate, which means a beach in BM is the same beach the public sees on BeachSafe.

Built for reliability

This is software that produces documents councils spend money against, so it is built like it. Continuous integration on every change, automated end-to-end testing with Cypress, visual regression testing through Percy.io — which matters more than usual when the deliverable is a rendered report — and Docker-based deployments.

The Results

• A single national platform for assessing beach safety and issuing the findings to land managers
• A shared taxonomy so assessments are comparable between assessors, states and years
• Field-capable, including offline, through the web platform and its mobile companion
• Part of a long-running engagement — Nano Solutions has been building, evolving and operating Surf Life Saving systems for over a decade
• Quality-engineered, with report rendering itself under visual regression testing

Technology

Laravel backend with a Vue.js frontend, packaged with Docker and deployed through GitLab CI. Cypress for end-to-end testing, Percy.io for visual regression. Mobile companion built on Capacitor so the same codebase runs as a native iOS and Android app for field assessors. National single sign-on against Surf Life Saving's membership systems.

See also: SLSA BeachSafe — the public face of Surf Life Saving Australia's beach data, and SLSA Operations App — the field tool used by patrols.

Related Nano Solutions services: Systems Integration · App Security. WA government agencies can engage us directly through our CUAICTS2021 panel listing.