In Castel
Maggiore, a town of 18 thousand inhabitants in the Bologna metropolitan area,
there is a company that specializes in software for other companies. Around 30
people work in Analysis, with a turnover of almost €2 million. The market is
mainly Italian, but the applications are ready to expand abroad. For FARE
INSIEME Giampaolo Colletti interviewed Pier Alberto Guidotti, founder and CEO
of Analysis
by Giampaolo Colletti
@gpcolletti
Photocredit: Giacomo Maestri e Francesca Aufiero
This is the
story of a dream that shattered but enabled another one to come true, because
life - just like work - takes unexpected turns. The story we are about to tell
began in 1994, when newly-graduated Pier Alberto Guidotti sent his CV to a
company he considered a myth, Ferrari. But Maranello replied with a “we’ll get
back to you”. “That great passion for Formula 1 led me to dream about a career
in motor racing. It was my father, the founder of Stefal, a company I worked
for while I was studying and which then led to Analysis, who suggested I work
in IT, a subject that had only just started to be taught in schools. It was the
early 1980s and PCs had just been invented. During my first years at school, I
fell in love with programming, which is still my great passion together with
Formula 1. Now I feel the same enthusiasm as I toy with the possibility Chat
GPT provides to enter the same commands using simple sentences in Italian or
English rather than with the language of programming,” reports Pier Alberto
Guidotti, founder and CEO of Analysis.
Company
profile This Emilian entrepreneur has been working in the IT sector for the
past 35 years dealing with the digitization of company processes. He set up
Analysis in the mid-1990s. The headquarters is located in Castel Maggiore, a
town of 18 thousand people in the Bologna metropolitan area. Around 30 people
work there, with a turnover of almost €2 million. The market is mainly Italian,
but the applications are ready to expand abroad. Guidotti started in the family
business, Stefal, by managing the quality and IT systems. Then came Analysis.
The objective was an ambitious one: to develop a software capable of helping
companies to improve their daily activities. QualiWare was born, a software
that enables compliance with quality standards such as ISO 9001, safety and
environmental ones. Then there is ActiveDoc for the management of documents
and, finally, EasyFootprint to calculate environmental footprint. Today, the
three applications boast almost 900 installations. “What we often say is that
it is not users who must adapt to a system. That is why our software were
developed to be customised based on different needs,” points out Guidotti, who
also wrote two books on company digitization.
Listening
makes the difference But Guidotti thinks something else must be done before
talking about technology, i.e. listening. “The first thing to do is listen to
the client to understand their needs. After that, clients become an integral
part of the team. When companies ask us to customise products,we involve them
in the various development phases, keeping them up to date and following them
during the implementation. We never tell our clients that something cannot be
done, we always try to provide alternatives showing the pros and cons,” says
Guidotti. Flexible tools, easy to use and economically sustainable when it also
comes to their maintenance are at the basis of our work. What makes the
difference between us and our competitors - even very structured ones - is the
great flexibility of structures and software in the approach to problem
solving. “Client themselves can own the solution, with the option to perform
their own customisations by creating forms, workflows, dashboards and reports
based on their own needs. We want to help as many companies as possible to
digitize the management of their processes and activities. They can therefore
save time and resources: in fact, our software feature various tools to
customise the system based on different needs without having to purchase new
systems that then need to be connected,” highlights Guidotti. In the meantime,
the company is working on solutions linked with AI capable of extracting
essential data that needs to be archived from any document, telling the system
what to do using concepts expressed in Italian. But, between human and
technological capital, Guidotti firmly favours the first. “Technology is what
actually counts less, because people and their sense of belonging are what
makes the difference.” Simon Sinek, one of marketing’s contemporary thinkers,
also believes this: “People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it.”
https://podcast.confindustriaemilia.it/
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