One System Where Plants
Normally Run Four
An asset-intensive plant does not buy one piece of software. It buys a maintenance system, a procurement system, a quality system, an asset governance system, a daily management system and a video system... from four or five vendors... and then it pays somebody to make them agree with each other. ProAlert™ ships all of it as one product on one database, so there is nothing to connect.
The Second Invoice Is the One That Hurts
Every vendor in this market quotes a licence fee. None of them quote the integration tax, which is what you actually pay to make their product cooperate with the other three you already own. It has four parts, and only the first one appears on a purchase order.
The Connection Cost
Somebody has to build the pipes. Field mapping, identity reconciliation, scheduling, error handling and a test plan, usually delivered by a contractor who has never seen your plant before and will not be there when it breaks.
The Maintenance Cost
Four vendors ship upgrades on four schedules. Every one of those releases is a chance for a mapping to silently stop working, and the integration is nobody's product, so nobody owns it.
The Reconciliation Cost
When the maintenance system says the press ran 412 hours and the production system says 388, someone spends a morning deciding which number goes in the report. That morning happens every month, forever.
The Capability Cost
The expensive one. "What did this asset cost us last quarter, all in?" needs maintenance labor, parts, scrap, downtime and the labor rate of the crew that was running it. If those live in four products, that question does not get answered... it gets dropped.
What Is Normally Separate, and What ProAlert Provides
Left column: the product category a plant would ordinarily license from an outside vendor. Right column: the same capability inside ProAlert, on the same database as everything else in this table.
| Normally a separate purchase | What that vendor is sold as | In ProAlert |
|---|---|---|
| Maintenance management | A standalone CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or EAM suite | Work orders with SLA tracking, task checklists, labor time and parts consumption. Preventive maintenance on time, meter, condition or event triggers with nested schedules and automatic work-order generation. Inspections, temporary-fix control with escalation timers, 5-Why root cause analysis with effectiveness verification, ISO 14224 (Equipment Reliability Data Standard) failure taxonomies, FMEA (Failure Mode and Effects Analysis) worksheets, and craft records with certification expiry. |
| Procurement and inventory | A purchasing or MRO inventory package | Purchasing dashboard and planning board, request-for-quote workflow, purchase orders with configurable multi-level approval chains, a personal pending-approvals queue, parts inventory across multiple storerooms with reorder points and cycle counts, low-stock reporting, demand forecasting, forward preventive-maintenance parts requirements, and supplier catalogues. |
| Quality and nonconformance | A QMS or nonconformance tracking tool | Nonconformance register with a published workflow, reject codes and groups, scrap capture with per-source thresholds and an approval queue for violations, defect heat mapping by physical location on the part, last-stage inspection checklists, document control with typed and versioned documents, and electronic signature capture. |
| Asset governance and compliance | An ISO 55001 consultancy plus a spreadsheet, or a dedicated compliance product | A complete ISO 55001 (Asset Management System) module: asset management policy, Strategic Asset Management Plan, Asset Management Plans, objectives, internal audits, management reviews, certification roadmaps and a Plan-Do-Check-Act workflow view. Asset financial records with depreciation, transfers between legal entities, profitability analysis, and FAA Airworthiness Directive tracking with its own compliance dashboard. |
| Daily management | A lean consultancy, whiteboards, and a recurring meeting | ProAlert A-FMDS: the daily board, automatic gap detection against plan, problem records with lifecycle and ownership, action registers, escalation rules, coaching records, Leader Standard Work checklists, tiered meeting management, compliance scoring, and a learning service that surfaces prior resolutions for similar problems. |
| Labor costing | A time-and-attendance system plus a finance export | Workforce administration, teams, positions, organizational assignment, crew templates and crew check-in, timeclock integration by webhook, and three labor dashboards... plant view, finance view and asset profitability... each with CSV and Excel export. |
| Production planning | A scheduling module bolted onto the ERP | Shift schedule configuration, floor Schedule HUD (Heads-Up Display), kanban cards with customer records, planned downtime scheduling, production sources and notes, product and part masters, stocking units, manufacturing routes, and die-changeover cost analysis for die-driven manufacturing. |
| Performance analytics | An OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) monitoring product | Per-asset OEE with independently licensed Availability, Performance and Quality tiers, each with its own subscription window. An Organization Health dashboard scoped by business unit and period with configurable thresholds, restricted to C-level roles. KPI targets, and CSV, Excel and PDF export. |
| Video management | A VMS and an NVR appliance from a security vendor | RTSP (Real Time Streaming Protocol) camera integration, recording server management, event-triggered capture with pre- and post-event buffers, correlation of clips to the operational record they belong to, and clip export. |
| Machine connectivity | Industrial middleware or an IoT gateway, priced per line | ProAlert EdgeSense: a .NET 8 edge client on Raspberry Pi hardware with GPIO and digital I/O, Modbus TCP/RTU PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) connectivity, cycle counting, production state detection, offline buffering with automatic sync, a local sensor display, and a visual workflow rule builder so a customer defines edge behaviour without code. |
| Mobile field execution | A vendor's companion app, usually read-only | ProAlert Mobile (PAM), a .NET MAUI (Multi-platform App UI) application for Android, iOS and Windows covering work order execution, task completion, labor entry, parts usage, asset lookup, inventory check, material requests, crew check-in, A-FMDS access, barcode and QR scanning, GPS, offline operation and push notification. |
| Shop-floor response | An andon board, a light stack and a pull-cord installation | Role-based routing of calls through the organizational graph, first-responder claim so only one responder is dispatched, response and resolution timing, PIN-protected closure, structured failure classification on close, and responder route visualization. |
Four Things Everything Shares
Convergence is not a bundle. A vendor can sell you six products under one logo and one invoice and you still own six databases. What makes this different is that all fourteen disciplines were built against the same four foundations.
One Asset Model
A press is one record. The work order references it, the nonconformance references it, the purchase order line references it, the depreciation schedule references it, and the shift plan references it. There is no asset ID mapping table anywhere in this platform, because there is nothing to map.
One Organizational Graph
A multi-parent Business Resource graph, a directed acyclic graph rather than a tree, so a plant, area, line and cell can each roll up more than one way at once... by geography, by legal entity, by product family... supporting multi-site and multi-legal-entity operations without a second hierarchy to maintain.
One Audit Trail
The audit record is written automatically on every auditable record through a shared data-access layer, not bolted on screen by screen. It does not depend on a developer remembering to log a change, which is why it holds up when an auditor tests it.
One Event Stream
An event captured at a machine is available to every discipline at the moment it happens. That is the property an integration cannot reproduce, because an integration is a copy on a schedule and a shared stream is not a copy at all.
One Event, Eleven Disciplines, No Export
A bearing fails on a stamping press at 02:40. Here is what happens in a plant running one database, and none of the steps involve a file leaving one system and arriving in another.
- EdgeSense sees the press stop and the state change is recorded against the asset.
- The Availability component of that asset's OEE reflects the stoppage without anyone entering it.
- A call routes to the maintenance role configured for that press, and the first responder to claim it is the only one dispatched.
- A video clip covering the seconds before and after the stop is captured and attached to the record.
- A work order is created from the matching standard work template, already carrying the asset, the run, the product and the shift.
- The technician's labor time accrues against that work order from the moment the first task starts.
- The replacement bearing is consumed from a storeroom, inventory drops, and the reorder point fires a purchase requisition into the approval chain.
- Closure captures equipment, detail, cause and resolution against the ISO 14224 taxonomy, behind the responder's PIN.
- The stoppage appears as a gap on the A-FMDS daily board, is promoted to a problem with an owner and a due date, and escalates on its own if nothing moves.
- Scrap produced during the run is attributed to the source that produced it and, if it breaches threshold, held for supervisor approval.
- Cost of the event... labor, parts, downtime and the crew running at the time... lands on the asset profitability dashboard the executive reads on Monday.
Every step above is a normal function of the platform. What a plant on four vendors does instead is perform steps 1, 3 and 5 in three products and then spend the rest of the month arguing about steps 10 and 11.
The Fourteen Disciplines, In One Place
Each one links to the detail behind it.
- Maintenance Management (CMMS)
- Procurement and Supply Chain
- Quality and Nonconformance
- Asset Lifecycle and Compliance
- A-FMDS Daily Management
- Workforce and Labor Costing
- Production Planning and Scheduling
- Performance Analytics and Executive Dashboards
- Video Management (VMS)
- EdgeSense Industrial IoT
- ProAlert Mobile (PAM)
- Safety and Emergency Broadcast
- Platform Foundation
- Response Coordination
Bring the list of systems you are paying for.
We will walk your stack against this table on a 30-minute call and tell you honestly what ProAlert does and does not cover.
