Digital Transformation in Personal Protective Equipment Management: Design and Implementation of a Web-Based Digital Custody and Audit Trail System

Paper-based personal protective equipment (PPE) custody documentation remains widespread in Turkish small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and public institutions despite traceability obligations under the Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) Law No. 6331, generating recordretention vulnerabilities and audit liability risks. Adopting a Design Science Research (DSR) framework, this study presents a web-based PPE digital custody artifact evaluated against three legislatively grounded design criteria: audit integrity (C1), regulatory compatibility (C2), and institutional adoptability (C3). The artifact operationalizes Walsh and Ungson’s organizational memory framework, transferring custody records from individual-dependent and physically vulnerable repositories to a relational database, markedly reducing staff-departure and archive-destruction failure modes. Indicative process measurements (n=15 digital transactions against an n=3 paper baseline) yield reductions of approximately 87% in record generation time and 94% in archive retrieval time, pending larger-sample replication. Normative legal analysis establishes that Canvas-based handwritten signatures constitute a simple electronic signature recognized under EU eIDAS, US ESIGN/UETA, and Turkish Law No. 5070. Although not a qualified-signature equivalent, the composite audit trail can serve as an evidentiary record where public key infrastructure (PKI) is absent, subject to judicial determination. Twelve role-based access control (RBAC) functional test cases confirm that the hierarchical architecture enforces the separation of duties required by Law No. 6331. The findings provide a replicable artifact specification and a DSR evaluation template for the OHS management information system (OHS-MIS) deployment in resource-constrained settings.