UPE-E

Underground plant and equipment tracking

UPE-E is Deftec's purpose-built equipment register for underground coal mining operations. It tracks, inspects, and manages every piece of plant from lamp room to longwall — thermal cameras, gas detectors, test instruments, power tools, laptops, and other portable electronics used underground. The system replaces manual registers and spreadsheets with a centralised web application and kiosk interface.

Operators scan any identifier — barcode, RFID, QR code, or manual entry — to check equipment out to a named person and check it back in with optional notes. Every movement is recorded in an append-only custody ledger that is never deleted, providing a complete chain of custody for every item. The scan-to-checkout workflow completes in under five seconds at kiosk terminals.

Configurable inspection templates with typed fields (Pass/Fail, Yes/No, Text, Number, Date) enforce structured compliance workflows. Inspectors submit inspections against any template with photo attachments, and the system tracks due dates with default intervals per template or per-equipment overrides. An overdue dashboard widget gives administrators instant visibility of compliance gaps across the entire register.

Three deployment modes are available — cloud-hosted on Azure for fast setup with no infrastructure to manage, on-premise via Docker for sites that need to keep data on the OT network, or fully air-gapped from a USB drive for isolated underground networks. UPE-E works completely offline and uses SQLite by default with optional PostgreSQL for multi-tenant cloud deployments.