Sustainable Innovation
Process sustainability as the key to choosing business management software.
Entersys Srl
Entersys (Enterprise Systems) was founded as a result of the partners’ desire to promote their idea of Sustainable Innovation in the world of Small and Medium Enterprises. Starting from an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) System and through the Free Software model, our company intends to promote an ecosystem of Solutions for Work Planning, Communication, Data Sharing and Management Control.
Where you can find us
Zelo ERP
Zelo, an ERP system originally based on Odoo but which over time has embarked on its own development roadmap (implementing numerous new tools, workflows, and applications) is the first step in a much larger project dedicated to integrating technology solutions to serve businesses. The Start Up formula, strongly oriented towards Research and Development of innovative processes (whether technological or simply methodological) lends itself well to the Project Team’s objectives: unlike any other product existing on the market, Zelo has the ambition to become a management software capable of learning autonomously (through the analysis of business activities, their consequences, the results obtained and market indicators) how the company is managed and propose scenarios or corrective actions to the decisions and operations carried out by the staff. With this in mind, it becomes even more relevant for the coming years to integrate it with the many dedicated business tools on the market.
Innovation
From a global perspective, one of our goals is to bring to micro and small companies tools currently available exclusively to much more structured entities (big data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, etc…). The growing gap between large companies and SMEs is thus bridged, fostering their dialogue and breaking down boundaries that limit their competitiveness in the global market.
Technology
The technological content of our solutions (first and foremost, business management software) lies mainly in the advantages of adopting a model such as Free Software: this allows a multitude of tools to be freely used and integrated with each other, which, when taken individually, offer excellent functionality, but are even more effective and important when integrated with each other (real-time collaboration, videoconferencing, and more generally anything that breaks down geographic or language barriers, in line with the needs of an increasingly globalized market).
Sustainability
For a long time, Microenterprises and SMEs in our country have been made to believe that the process of Innovation necessarily passed through the acquisition of new technologies, effectively turning the “Innovative Process” into the “Technological Innovation Process.” This led to neglecting all other aspects, such as decision-making processes, workflows or planning, just to mention some examples. In other words: sustainability. At Entersys, we think that innovation in the company must necessarily go through a structured, sustainable, and therefore customized project, within which “technologies” represent exclusively one part (more or less relevant, but certainly not the only part).
Free Software
We do not want to reinvent the wheel: the use of free software allows us to lean on a mine of excellent software that already exists, which can be adapted to our needs (and thus to those of our clients) with competitive performance and lower final costs than proprietary solutions. We agree with philosophers and mathematicians about “being nothing but dwarfs on the shoulders of giants”: the result of our efforts will take us farther when resting on the mountain of existing knowledge rather than stubbornly starting from scratch.
Research and Development: the open environment allows us to experiment with innovative solutions, such as applying Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to business processes, in collaboration with universities and research centers around the world that support this philosophy. We believe this is the best way to quickly bring the benefits of innovations to our clients’ processes, while at the same time giving back our small contribution to the mountain of human knowledge.
Continuity of solutions and intellectual honesty: Free software allows anyone with the proper skills to access and modify the code in order to meet the needs that are constantly and frantically changing in the modern world. Unlike proprietary software, our open solutions can always be adapted to your business, both in the short and long term, without the risk of finding yourself in the dead end of an unsupported product.
No licensing costs: valuable resources that are normally eroded by proprietary software licensing costs can instead be saved, or more intelligently invested in customizations and training that instead enable your business to grow and keep up with the times. Integration of management software, for example, normally requires work on analysis, design, simulation, training, etc..
Customizability: Experience shows that two companies, both engaged in the production of the same product (even with the same features and functionality), use in most cases significantly different production methods and techniques that change with time. Free software is the only solution that can guarantee the necessary adaptability.
Interoperability: The electronic exchange of data, whether between machines, between systems in the same company, between customers and suppliers, between systems in different companies or between companies and the public administration is a critically important process at the heart of any company’s life. Free software makes it possible to develop the connectors needed to break down communication barriers between different systems, and thus ultimately to create integrated, innovative and advanced tools that can operate on a large scale and with automatic processes for data interchange, recording and analysis.
Critical issues
The major critical issues found for SMEs in innovation processes are:
– The absence of in-house technical expertise-
– The difficulty in investing in management systems-
– The technological barriers
So what should any “ideal Business Management System” look like? It should be accessible and simple, so that users can use it intuitively and be guided in acquiring the necessary technical skills for their personal benefit and therefore for the company they work for, but not so simplified as to limit its usefulness; it should be economically viable in the short and long term, with implementation, customization, and maintenance costs accessible and predictable; it should be open and modern, so that it can be modified and adapted to the needs of the company for the removal of technological barriers and the implementation of the latest technologies.
In Brief
There are many advantages by adopting a system based on Free Software. These include: the absence of licensing costs resulting in the ability to reallocate resources toward training and support and the ability to intervene with customizations, tools and services related to such applications.