PROMIS® – whom is it for and where can it be used?
Managing the maintenance process within Small-Medium Enterprises (SMEs) often entails high direct and indirect costs. Now they can benefit from a new software solution helping them to develop their maintenance processes.
ESPECIALLY DURING periods of economical and financial crisis, SMEs do not invest in improving and re-engineering their Maintenance Engineering Processes (MEP), thus leading to additional productive and economical losses. In order to make the MEP sustainable for SMEs, it is necessary to implement new organizational models by adopting innovative solutions.
PROMIS® (1) is a Software-as-a-Service and intranet platform of interactive services that allows organizations, institutions and consultants to find their way in the maze of legal, standards, norms and other regulations to which they are submitted. At the same time it allows them to structure their processes and knowledge in a way that results in improved access to customers, better relations with regulatory authorities and financial institutions, faster and easier certification, smoother audits, improved operations and significant cost reductions.
PROMIS® is not a mere service or product; it is much more a ‘living organism’ and instrument to make knowledge a tangible asset. It is also an eBusiness enabler, which aims at building alliances between institutional and private stakeholders, structuring the best of their knowledge and content, training and interactive services to be offered to smaller organizations, their consultants and interested parties.
The innovation of this intuitive integrated compliance management framework is, at present, made unique by the multilingualism of the PROMISLingua (2) project which translated and localised the PROMIS® service in nine languages (DE, EN, ES, FR, GR, IT, PT, RO, HU). This includes the integration of the machine translation, in order to support structuring, filtering and optimising data and content in a way that SMEs can communicate in their own language and get answers to their needs ‘at a fingertip’ online in the same language.
PROMIS® Maintenance Solution (3) has been designed to provide SMEs with a pool of maintenance Experts, who give online guidance and assistance through a technological platform available in a “Software-as-a-Service” mode. By adopting this innovative remote tutoring approach, SMEs can obtain the following benefits (both economical and organizational):
- No hardware costs.
- Implementation of a structured and easy-to-use maintenance information system, which allows improving planning (e.g. preventive vs. corrective maintenance techniques), management and control (e.g. KPIs analysis), of the maintenance activities, thus increasing overall plant availability.
- Having an internal maintenance department, with high maintenance engineering skills and competences, but at low costs – i.e. a lean and sustainable organizational structure.
- Empowerment of the Users “interfaced” with the PROMIS Experts.
In PROMIS® knowledge is structured in a three-sided pyramid which is easily accessible through a graphic user interface that can be configured at will. The pyramid is horizontally subdivided in levels. Each face is vertically subdivided in sectors. Associations, chambers, institutions and consultants can create their own pyramids therefore they are being more and more recognized as instru ment to build Communities of Knowledge (4), institutional and private.
Individual Workplace Dashboard. Homepage Screenshot
How to build a pyramid: the structure. The Integrated Management System
The Pyramid
The core of the PROMIS® service consists of an integrated management generic solution for compliance, governance and management for Health & Safety, Environment, Quality (SHEQ), Risk Management and other standards. This management tool provides a structure and functionality to systematically maintain a risk informed IMS based on a plan, do, check, act cycle promoting continual improvement. It assists key personnel of an SME to recognise and to respond to the tasks in connection with SHEQ-related legal compliance. Following recognition of potential risks it effectively supports SMEs in achieving compliance by providing three alternatives:
- Use of all the services in complete autonomy by SME managers.
- Use a part of, or all the services with the assistance of an SME service organization such as Associations of SMEs and associations of SME-Consultants.
- Use a part of, or all the services with the support of regional consultants recognised by the PROMIS® qualifying system (5).
The process of pre-standardisation in the form of the CEN Workshop 75 (6) with the title: “Terminology Policy to support generic applications of Management Systems with focus on smaller Organisations in a Multilingual Environment” started on 29.07.2013 and emphasizes the importance of PROMIS® for European SMEs. n
Access to a free of charge overview and demo of PROMISmaintenance and PROMIS Chemical Process Safety in 7 languages is available at the following link: www.promislingua.eu .
- PROMIS® (www.promis.eu) is the result of former R&D, Market Validation and Initial Deployment projects co-funded by the European Commission
- PROMISLingua – Performance Operational and Multilingual Interactive Services to support Compliance for SMEs in Europe. www.promislingua.eu
- MTM Ltd., Andrea Maciga, (http://www.promislingua.eu/en/the_project-solutions.html).
- Communities of Knowledge in the Daily Life of an SME - The PROMIS® Example, eChallenges e-2012 Proceedings, Paul and Miriam Cunningham (Eds.), IIMC International Information Management Corporation, 2012, ISBN: 978-1-905824-35-9 Caterina Berbenni-Rehm, Andrei Druta, Richard Gowland.
- https://www.promis.eu/eu/wp-content/themes/promis/custom-2/files/CEN_CWA_16275_March_2011_FINAL.pdf
- http://www.cen.eu/cen/Sectors/TechnicalCommitteesWorkshops/Workshops/Pages/WS75.aspx
