On a technologically advanced campus in San Pietro in Casale, in
the Bologna area, there is a jewel of a company that helps other companies to
improve processes, services and performance. This is the story of Centro
Software, created to accompany small and medium enterprises in the digitisation
process. For FARE INSIEME, Giampaolo Colletti interviews Lorenzo Battaglini,
CEO of Centro Software
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Arriving before others can make a difference. After all, this is
the winning recipe for pioneers, i.e. of those innovators who follow unexplored
paths to go further. Of course, it takes vertical and transversal skills,
extreme dedication, courage to spare and a team that makes the difference. Here
you are, these are the ingredients that are enclosed in the story we are about
to tell. It all starts with two Emilians who made their career debut in the
early 1980s in one of the most advanced Italian companies of the time. One of
the few that exported technology to Japan and the United States. Those were
also the years of the advent of PCs, a real revolution, probably even more so
than the Internet. At the time, digital culture was zero and it was only
starting to spread among the biggest companies, but unrelated to work
organisation models. In that period the brilliant intuition arrives for the
two: to create a management system with those organisational and functional
concepts that until then were the exclusive prerogative only of large
companies, while in Italy the production fabric was 98% made up of small and
medium enterprises.
From the
Emilia-Romagna region to the whole world. This is how
Centro Software was established, launched in 1988 and which today, also considering the contribution of its partners,
boasts over 300 employees, including technicians and application consultants,
throughout Italy. Goal: to improve the control and management of company
processes. Today the Emilia-based company develops digital solutions for
business management, including the most complete, most integrated, and most
advanced multilingual ERPs in Italy, used by over 3,000 customers worldwide.
Thus, ERP – an acronym that stands for Enterprise
Resource Planning, i.e., business management software – today arrives in
Germany, France, Spain, the UK, America, China, Poland, Romania, Brazil. And
then we go beyond the borders thanks to artificial intelligence tools. ERPs
naturally benefit from the most recently developed technologies, but the design
and development of software, their components and their functions is rigorously
made in Italy. We are in San Pietro in Casale, a town of twelve thousand souls
in the Bologna area. Here a campus of eleven thousand square metres was born
that opened up to the whole world. «We have the ambition to increasingly create
a place where not only our research and development projects are carried out,
but also where our values are expressed plastically. We want to ensure that
each of us is in a position to love their job, to feel involved both
emotionally and creatively, as well as to feel safe», says Lorenzo Battaglini,
CEO of Centro Software.
Human and technological
capital. People first, technologies second. But human
capital and technological capital become winners together in bringing value to
customers by connecting the processes of a company. Because technology without
people is zero. And because artificial intelligence does not exist unless
linked to the role of people. «Thanks to our holistic vision, when we establish
a relationship with a new customer, we almost always find a company organised
in silos, i.e. composed of watertight compartments, and where the departments and divisions fight each other
rather than conquering the market. The reason is almost always the lack of
information: if I had known I would have done it, if you had told me I would
have acted differently... And in this case the victim is always the end
customer. Our ERP becomes the information backbone of the company: in this way
we connect the dots and there is no better satisfaction than seeing when we
finish our work that things have changed quite a bit», explains Battaglini. At
the centre of this revolution are the small and medium enterprises, which
represent the industrial treasure of the Italian system. «It is said that small
is not synonymous with simple and that is exactly the case: the majority of our SMEs are included in national and
international supply chains, where by now we no longer produce just a product,
but a "product-service" is required: whoever buys a screw also
expects to receive the digital twin, i.e. the element to insert in your CAD
that allows you to simulate, in addition to the now trivial dimensional
reproduction, also the physical characteristics. The synthesis is that for SMEs
there is no plan B with respect to the progressive digitisation of all
processes», says Battaglini. Thus, the adoption of technology also becomes
a driving force for attracting new generation talent. «Zoomers and millennials
are the near future and in some ways already the present of our companies: they
conceive work in a different way than their fathers, they are very familiar
with technology and so we certainly cannot offer them organisational models and
tools of the past Millennium. Companies that have not embarked on a
digitisation process will not be able to keep these people for a long time»,
concludes Battaglini. Once again the game of the best realities in the field is
played on the attractiveness of people.
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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