Corporate Social Responsibility

 Prime Technology For Our Community

At DS PRIMA we believe that continued integration of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) into everything we do is central to our company’s business success and a keystone of shared value creation. We apply our team’s specialised skills to improve our community through the use of information technologies. We are committed to conducting our business with respect for ethical operation, the environment, and positive societal impact. Although we are a small business, we believe that being socially responsible is the best way to do our job.

Our approach to CSR is explained by our “Triple-Clock Model for CSR”. This is how it works:

  • Our core business -Development of prime software solutions- is the point of departure and return of our CSR
  • The double arrow clock-hands represent two-way communication, two-way fulfilment of goals, and reciprocal benefit (win-win relation)
  • Our first responsibility (inner clock circle) is to our stakeholders. We engage with each of them clockwise through that double arrow effect and gather their inputs.
  • We apply those inputs into our second clock circle that is made out of our business’s philosophy, operations and management. We do this within each of the items clockwise and with the same double arrow effect.
  • We carry out all of the above under the umbrella of continuous improvement methodology, represented by the outer clock circle.

As a result of systematically applying our Tipple-Clock Model and after conducting a materiality analysis to identify our priority issues, we have organised our CSR Management Approach based on three CSR pillars and their respective priority items are shown next.

DS PRIMA’s priority issues and main functions of our CSR team

DS PRIMA’s priority issues and main functions of our CSR team

DS PRIMA is currently in the process of obtaining the “Trusted Organisation Certification” by the Branded Trust Foundation which brings businesses into compliance with several international standards such as the ISO 26000, UN Global Compact Principles, the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), amongst others.

Following we provide a brief form social responsibility report for 2015:

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Governance and ethics

DS PRIMA’s Director oversees all significant business issues including strategy, service issues, corporate responsibility, legal and ethical compliance.

We follow our Ethics Management System in order to conduct ourselves legally, ethically and consistent with our corporate values thorough our value chain.

Code of conduct

We expect that all DS PRIMA’s team act in accordance with our business Code of Conduct. It can be easily downloaded clicking here. Our Code of Conduct applies to all DS PRIMA directors, managers, employees and contractors and it gives us guidelines about how to act regarding anti-corruption, non-discrimination, human rights, confidentiality, non-disclosure, intellectual property, amongst other topics.

Ethics assurance

We have a set of procedures in order to ensure we put our policies into practice. Some of those practices are about:

  • Tracking law and regulations updates
  • Communicating and training our team and stakeholders on our code and policies
  • Definition of our team’ roles within the Ethics Management System
  • Reporting, monitoring, following-up and record keeping of concerns and suspected breaches of our Code
  • Disciplinary and corrective procedures
  • Review of our Ethics Management system
  • Ethical procurement procedures
  • Confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement guidelines
  • Intellectual property protection guidelines

Feedback and concerns

We encourage our team and external stakeholders to give us their feedback and report their concerns in the way they feel most comfortable. Our Director has an open-door policy to attend all this personally, however we understand if people want to do it anonymously. That is why we also provide to you all the Feedback & Concerns Channel, a service provided by a third party called Branded Trust Assurance. If you want to submit your feedback, please click on the button below and provide (copy/paste) the following code: MC10-C12345 

2015 excerpts

100% of our team trained in our Ethics Management System

100% of our agreements and contracts revised for ethics compliances

0 concerns or breaches on our Code of Conduct reported

Fair employment

DS PRIMA is a privately owned IT company that strives to keep a lean structure to ensure we are cost-effective and responsive to our clients’ requirements. DS PRIMA designs legal and fair agreements with our collaborators according to market benchmarks. We always act professionally and we strive to give our team the opportunity to receive professional advice in this field.

Our commitment to them is that we will abide by our agreements, in which we clearly specify all terms and benefits such as parental leave, minimum notice periods regarding relevant changes, matters related to collective agreements, amongst others.

Occupational Health & Safety

We strive to provide a safe and healthy work environment for those working for, and on behalf of, DS PRIMA. We develop and implement health and safety actions management programs designed to promote a safe and healthy work environment, avoid unsafe situations, maintain legal compliance, and respond to incidents and medical emergencies.

For example, we have established an Ergonomics recommendation section in all our Welcome Manuals with the aim to reduce incidence of pain, discomfort, and ergonomics-related injuries. We also encourage our team members to use standing desks whenever possible.

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Diversity and Equal opportunity

At DS PRIMA we are proud to have the most talented employees, associates, and contractors of varied cultural backgrounds. We all have something in common, a strong commitment to our clients and our philosophy.

We strive to attract, develop, remunerate, promote and retain talented individuals based on achievements and performance indicators and not on gender, background, religion, or other irrelevant personal attributes at all levels of the company.

We are conscious that one of our challenges for the next year is to balance the ratio female-male participation in the operations tier of our company.

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Work-life balance

At DS-PRIMA we strive to provide our team members with the opportunity to balance their work and private life.

Some actions we foster in order to provide work-life balance amongst our team members are remote work options, flexible times and part-time positions.

We are certain that this philosophy, which is based on our trust in each of our collaborations, has contributed to their satisfaction and permanency in their roles.

2015 excerpts

100% of new collaborator trained in DS PRIMA’ philosophy

0 injuries reported in the workplace, 2.5% absentee rate

40% of female talent in total, 50% in senior management positions

70% of collaborators either in flexitime, remote working or part-time roles

Resources efficiency

We have a responsibility to operate in an environmentally sound manner. We are currently in the process of redefining our Environmental Management System to define key metrics, develop tracking systems, and identify and implement projects to reduce our environmental footprint.

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Through these measures, we aim to incorporate environmental sustainability, and particularly energy efficiency, into how we develop and deliver software products and services to our clients. Examples include the use of energy efficient IT equipment, implementation of software solutions such as automated power management, and enhanced data storage approaches

We are exploring and implementing ways to reduce the environmental impacts of our travel related activity as well as applying these measures in the selection of our suppliers in our value chain.

Prime Technology for Our Community

At DS PRIMA we look for ways to use our experience and resources to contribute to society. Through our “Prime Technology For Our Community” program, we help organisations by developing systems pro bono. Here are some examples:

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For Education

A local school raised funds via second-hand book sales. This was very time-consuming to organise and execute. We developed a cataloguing and selling system which cut preparation time from a week to a couple of days, reduced the selling session from a whole day to three hours, made the handling of financials much simpler and more accurate, saved many days of voluntary work, and increased their profit by 30%.

For community groups

A community association organised events that allowed them to raise funds. The ticket selling process was all done manually and the allocation of seats and verification of arrivals was cumbersome and inaccurate. We developed a ticket sales and verification system which enormously reduced the effort taken to sell and allocate seats, and cut the time to receive guests from four hours to one.

For health

An applicant to our program requested a solution that would promote patient-centred care. We responded by developing a platform that can be used to obtain patient-reported outcomes and improve clinical follow up. DS PRIMA has seen such a magnificent potential of shared value of this type of development that has created a strategic business unit Prima HealthTech http://www.prima-healthtech.com/  in order to maximise benefits to the society while contributing to our core business.

2015 excerpts

12% of reduction in our electricity consumption
9% of reduction in our water consumption
1920 person-hours of pro bono work for Prime Technology for Our Community
50% of our collaborators engaged in a volunteering activity

If you want to know more about our CSR commitment, or if you are a charity organisation and believe we can help you, please contact us.