New innovator

eCAT Electronic monitoring system

FROM HOSPITALS and production lines to clean rooms and warehouses, standards apply. Making sure they are met is costly and time consuming. Surprisingly, the vast majority of monitoring systems are still paper-based. New to market is eCAT, a cloud-based SAS compliance management solution from fledgling Dublin-based company, Electronic Compliance Audit Tools.

The eCAT system cuts out paper monitoring. It works on Android devices and users key in the relevant information which is uploaded to their compliance departments. The system automatically generates alerts. For example, a leaking pipe is directly reported to the maintenance manager.

Colm O’Neill and Francis Lyons set up eCAT in April last year. O’Neill is a computer science graduate with a background in compliance auditing within the fields of healthcare hygiene and infection control. As hygiene audits became an increasing part of his workload, O’Neill found himself recording vast amounts of data by hand and spending hours transferring it to his PC and generating reports.

“There had to be a smarter solution,” he says. “I looked at the software packages on the market but they were for single sectors such as healthcare whereas my business was spread across a range of industries. eCAT works across multiple commercial sectors for large and small organisations alike.”

O’Neill teamed up with Lyons, former commercial director of Largo Foods, and eCAT was approved for a €10,000 feasibility study grant from Fingal County Enterprise Board. The company has recently been approved for an additional €40,000 grant. The rest of the development costs (which O’Neill does not wish to disclose for competitive reasons) have been self-funded.

The biggest cost was developing software. O’Neill tried to get this done in Ireland, but was forced overseas by high prices. eCAT invited developers from all over the world to pitch for its business. The final choice was a company in India.

The eCAT system itself costs €12,500. In addition there is a set up fee of €150 and a fee of €150 per user after that. Thereafter customers pay an annual fee equivalent to 15 per cent of their initial spend. An eCAT “light” version for smaller enterprises is on the way. eCAT has already signed its first paying customers and the product is on trial with a number of firms, including Tesco.

O’Neill says what gives eCAT its edge is that it has been designed by people who understand the challenges of compliance from the inside.

– OLIVE KEOGH