In the second half of the 18th century, marine insurers based at Lloyd’s coffee house in London developed a system for the independent technical assessment of the ships presented to them for insurance cover.
The result was the Lloyd’s Register Book for 1764-65-66, which later became Lloyd’s Register of British and Foreign Shipping and which in turn was reconstituted as a self-standing classification society in 1834. The concept of classification spread to other countries and insurance markets with the establishment of several other major classification societies.
The European Union Recognised Organisations Mutual Recognition (EU RO MR) group represents the 11 organisations and was set up in response to new legislation from the European Parliament.
Article 10.1 of EU Regulation (EC) No 391/2009 requires those working in Europe to agree on procedures for mutual recognition. In theory, this means that if one company issues a certificate the others should accept it because they are all working to the same, mutually agreed technical requirements.
Project support for the EU RO MR group comes from the Secretariat, which is hosted by Lloyd’s Register.
The EU ROs immediately began to look at how to consult and work together on the implementation of Article 10.1. What was missing for the group was a single place accessible to all where they could create, collaborate and share all the documents, comments, meeting minutes, spreadsheets and emails that this work would generate, as well as the list of mutually recognised standards.
With the support of Lloyd’s Register’s IS Enterprise Architect, Program Framework, a Microsoft gold PPM specialist and Cloud Accelerate Partner, was approached to understand the requirements.
Said Gero Renker, director of Program Framework:
“The task was to build a collaborative solution to meet the needs of both the group and the range of individual organisations that would be straight forward for all to understand and use.”
Microsoft Office 365 was utilised to implement the solution. SharePoint’s Document Management, Records Management and Office on-demand assisted in providing EU RO MR a collaborative and content management solution which met the Board’s requirements.
“It has certainly made life simpler. For example, if we were working on a particular document I would have to pull together comments and information from many different emails. Now everyone can add their comments to the document and instead of many different spreadsheets, I only need one!”
“The thought of setting up an intercompany enterprise system was initially a daunting prospect."
"The various options available were investigated by the Lloyd’s Register IS department and it was obvious that Microsoft SharePoint appeared to be the industry standard. Program Framework, a specialist consultancy in this area of technology solutions, was given the task to train and mentor through the design and implementation phases."
"The SharePoint training provided to the Secretariat was excellent. It has been adopted well by all stakeholders.”
Cassandra Kelly, secretary to the EU RO Mutual Recognition Advisory Board
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