Project Management Software
Designed with simplicity in mind
Where We Fit In
Our team here at RiskMach help a lot of people who are in the middle, beginning or end of a project. This can be centred around all sorts of industrial machine builds, line builds, production plant and similar projects.
In a nutshell, the project management is looking to achieve the discipline of initiating planning, executing, controlling and closing the work of a team to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria.
Success criteria will include things like being able to make a product and to do so at a certain rate, at a certain time. Legally speaking these criteria are not relevant, but if you can not correctly evidence the CE marking process at the end of the project then it will not be certified. That is a costly risk.
If a machine is not certified then your project doesn't meet one of it's success criteria. Moreover, the customer who receives the machine is now operating something that has been incorrectly CE marked.
Improper CE marking in itself doesn't introduce risk to people but it does magnify risk to the business following any occurrences of accidents due to non compliance on that machine.
That's where RiskMach comes in
Finally, a comprehensive software solution that streamlines your CE marking process and protects your bottom line. What’s more, RiskMach comes with additional modules to form your one-stop SaaS project management needs.
Ensure success with our intelligent project management software
Identifying where project management is linked to machine building should be an early consideration. At the beginning of the project the manager will be building their team. A part of building that team is getting the right people and competencies. The manager should be identifying the areas of knowledge, or groups of people required to form that knowledge, so that they can successfully conduct the CE marking during the project.
Choosing the right project management systems to support those competencies and record the outcomes
Project managers are beginning to understand that they require not just knowledge, but a system to manage their process and that currently none of the off the shelf project management apps manage the conformity assessment procedure in any appropriate way. There is project management software already out there, none of which addresses CE marking. Some will have document management functionality to organise your files, and others may have built-in risk assessment tools to log issues as you find them. The problem with such generic software is that it is not designed to follow the conformity assessment procedure, compile the technical file, or produce the reports.
RiskCE, a pioneering and constantly evolving application, is RiskMach's answer to this gap in the market. It is a ce marking project management tool currently in live beta, with additional features being added continually as we learn with our customers what can be improved.
It's About Communication
Another milestone point within projects is communication. A lot of the competing software platforms will have communications built into them as does RiskCE. RiskCE is not just about recording but allowing access and communicating with all the stakeholders who are identified at the beginning of the project. We have all the cloud-based benefits you would expect, reporting, analysis and soon the comms module which will incorporate all the emails, text messages, bookings etc.
When managing those project communications it is essential to have a system in place that logs context and relationships. All interactions that go through RiskMach are logged, there is an action record, you can see who did what, where, when and why.
Getting in Line with the Machinery Directive
At the beginning of the project you have the knowledge and the tool but now need to determine the limits of the machine and therefore the project. This is, of course, assuming that the machine is the project.
Sometimes the project includes the building around a machine and so while it is no less machine focused, there are other factors in play. This is why the project management software available today is very generic because they don't know what elements they will be working with and thus don’t know what processes they need to follow.
As a project manager, you will have established that you need to follow the machinery directive to CE mark the new machine. Now you need to determine the limits of that machine, a description of which you could put into the project plan using generic software. But why settle for software that adds to your workload when you can have RiskCE assist and walk you through the process.
RiskCE determines the limits of the machines by:
Before software came along to help streamline the process, we were largely dependent on paper filing to get the job done. You would have to have a folder on the shelf called asset number 1. All the risks associated to asset number one would be in that folder on that shelf. And when asset number one was moved from area A to area B, you would have to pick up the folder from shelf area A and move it to shelf area B. Simple to say but hard to administer.
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Identifying the major units within the line
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Identifying the directives and standards that apply to those units
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Associating stakeholders and other interested parties to those units
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Building up a model of the line and the stakeholders relationship to that model
That last point is important. With RiskCE you know who you are asking, what you are asking them for, at what point and just as importantly where it begins and ends. RiskCE makes you define that.
We also provide an asset-tracking management functionality as part of our ReportHub.
Superior Intelligence to Streamline Your Project
Often you will be given a specification and halfway through the needs of the customer will change, and so the design will change. We need to record and track all of those adjustments. When the scope of the project involves building a machine there will always be risks. Project managers often think and talk about this in terms of risks to the project. But in terms of machine risk we have to be more specific.
Generic software doesn't support this level of specificity whereas RiskCE is perfectly placed for it. We use qualitative risk analysis methods to relate the level of risk to recognised boundaries and relate them to each other so that you can order them in terms of priority and nature.
Quantitative risk analysis tends to be done by professionals in a particular field, perhaps ergonomic or structural. That involves mathematics and calculations of figures in contrast to the qualitative analysis we do in risk assessment which is always an estimation of probability.
While the quantitative analysis would be done outside of RiskCE, you can evidence those calculations by uploading them as technical file inclusions. This is where you start to build up your evidence base within the software and crucially, organise and allocate that evidence to the right units.
When units move within a project, the related evidence goes with them and it is all organised and systemised in a way that has yet to be matched. Generic project management solutions can not intelligently handle such movements because it doesn't understand the relationships between those objects.
Is my Data Safe?
RiskCE has several auditing stages built in. For example, you need two people to close out an issue. If you’re going to run a report you have the option to use the quality audit feature before it is issued. There are several checks and review points built into the software to give you every opportunity to make sure that what you output is of high quality.
RiskCE is there for you right through to its eventual completion and handover. It tracks each issue and the resulting evidence in response to that issue, giving that second person the opportunity to approve or reject that closeout.
Comprehensive Reporting
There is also a very definitive point where the project in terms of ce marking the machine is complete. There are no reports left lying around unanswered. You will know when you have completed your ce marking using RiskCE because all the risk will have been actioned, addressed and approved by a second person. The technical construction file will have been compiled and reported on and you will have issued the declaration of conformity.
All of this will be evident not just of the process but of the outcome. Generic software and old-school manual paper filing can evidence a statement, but they can’t evidence a process. Because RiskCE builds a process into the software you have one less to enforce and supervise within your project.
Acquiring RiskCE is acquiring the knowledge of professionals
By using RiskCE to manage the CE marking of your project you are buying knowledge from the people that created the software, who just happen to be experts in CE marking machines. You are buying knowledge of that process and laying it over your project in a controlled, managed and transparent way. The result is you don't just have the outcome (the CE marked machine) or technical file, but the whole history and process that led up to that outcome. When we ask ourselves years later 'how did I come to that conclusion?' 'why was that machine delivered that way?' 'can I justify what the outcome was?'the evidence of the process is going to be the hero in the story