On Monday, November 10, ITER IDEA presented in Cagliari a milestone that marks a new step in our innovation journey: the first implementation of our scheduler based on quantum technologies.
Q-PLAN represents one of the first practical applications of quantum computing to the world of predictive and optimized planning in the smart-city domain. Although still in an experimental phase, we adapted the optimization algorithms developed so far by ITER IDEA so they can be used on both analog (annealer) and digital (gate-based) quantum computers.

While the development of large-scale quantum computers is a goal expected in the coming years, we have explored whether these problem-solving algorithms could achieve efficiency and current limitations.

Smart Cities and intelligent planning

The cities of the future cannot simply be ‘digital’: they must be predictive, adaptive, and resilient.
In this context, Q-PLAN introduces a new paradigm: the ability to anticipate and react to external changes (traffic, urgent maintenance, variations in resource availability, weather conditions, extraordinary events) through algorithms that learn and adapt in real time.

This approach opens the door to significant developments such as:

• Urban mobility management, with dynamic optimization of vehicles, shifts, and infrastructure.
• Predictive maintenance of networks and public services, reducing intervention times and costs.
• Energy and environmental management, thanks to intelligent resource distribution.
• Operational planning for public bodies, improving decision-making capabilities and responsiveness during critical moments.

A strategic support for Public Administration and urban mobility
Q-PLAN was created as a real-time decision-support tool for Public Administrations, state-owned companies, and urban mobility players. It enables the simulation of complex scenarios and identifies, within seconds, the most efficient configuration for allocating staff, vehicles, or infrastructure resources—even when facing strict constraints or limited resources.”

This predictive computing capability translates into a tangible competitive advantage: greater efficiency, reduced resource waste, and more resilient planning in the face of constantly evolving circumstances.

Innovation and collaboration

We had the opportunity to test the prototype in preview, and we were genuinely impressed: the speed with which Q-PLAN can recalculate entire operational plans based on external events positions it as one of the most promising tools in the AI Scheduling landscape.

Emanuele Marsili described in detail the technological foundations and the most innovative aspects of this project, and we thank the Municipality of Cagliari and CRS4 – the Center for Research, Development and Advanced Studies in Sardinia – for making this experimentation possible by providing the quantum hardware infrastructure.
As specialization in scheduling problems increases, it becomes necessary to monitor opportunities to bring the potential of quantum computing from the laboratory to real-world applications, transforming the way cities plan, manage, and optimize their resources. With Q-PLAN, smart urban planning enters a new phase: the one in which artificial intelligence meets the power of quantum computing.

A strategic support for Public Administration and urban mobility

Q-PLAN was created as a real-time decision support tool for Public Administrations, state-owned companies, and urban mobility players.
It allows the simulation of complex scenarios and the identification, in just a few seconds, of the most efficient configuration to allocate personnel, vehicles, or infrastructure resources, even in the presence of strict constraints or limited resources.
This predictive computing capability translates into a tangible competitive advantage: greater efficiency, reduced resource waste, and more resilient planning in the face of ever-changing circumstances.

A look to the future

ITER IDEA’s goal is clear: to bring the potential of quantum computing from the laboratory to real-world applications, transforming the way cities plan, manage, and optimize their resources.
Q-PLAN supports smart urban planning entering a new phase: one in which artificial intelligence meets the power of quantum computing to build cities that are more sustainable, efficient, and responsive.

Our goal in the U.S. is the same as it has always been: to understand the real challenges manufacturers face and demonstrate how AI can make a tangible difference in day-to-day operations. In order to get the most out of this experience we are collaborating with the WCTC Applied AI Lab in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, to bring this mission closer to reality.

As part of this initiative, we are organisize AI discovery sessions with manufacturers. These are 15-minute, hands-on conversations designed to gather insights about the specific challenges companies face when managing resources, schedules, and capacity. By understanding these real-world pain points, we can continue refining our AIRP platform, ensuring it addresses the most pressing operational challenges, such as task allocations on the production line for example.

Two-way learning opportunity

Manufacturers gain insights into how AI can be applied practically in their operations with a better understanding of the policies that need to be in place to the adoption within their facilities. Participants in the sessions will also be highlighted at gener8tor’s event on December 10th.

ITER IDEA has the opportunity to pich the new advancement of the AIRP platform.

By keep learning ourselves we believe AI is not an industry itself but a practical tool for different industries. By applying what we have started in Europe: by helping manufacturers adopt AI in ways that are simple, actionable, and effective.

Within this framework, ITER IDEA has been selected as one of the five winners of the Call4Solution DLab with the project Q-PLAN, an experimental extension of our product AIRP (AI-Aided Resource Planner) that integrates quantum computing algorithms to tackle highly complex scheduling problems.

AIRP: from AI planning to quantum computing

AIRP is ITER IDEA’s SaaS platform that enables organizations to design and deploy intelligent planning agents for optimal resource allocation, combining constraints, objectives, and historical data analysis.

Today, AIRP is already used in high-complexity, real-world scenarios:

• Public sector (GovTech): the Rural Payment Inspection Division of the Scottish Government uses AIRP to plan the activities of 550 staff members across 18 offices;
• Healthcare: to optimize nurse shift scheduling;
• Manufacturing: to support dynamic allocation of resources along production lines.

In just 10 months, ITER IDEA secured 7 PoCs with paying clients and gained international recognition, including a pre-acceleration contract from gener8tor Wisconsin in the United States and selection for the gBeta Applied AI Lab for Manufacturing.

Q-PLAN: the winning proposal

With Q-PLAN, ITER IDEA introduces the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) into AIRP’s optimization engine.

The goal is to assess whether quantum computing can:

• improve efficiency in high-dimensional, multi-objective scheduling problems;
• reduce computation times compared to classical Constraint Programming (CP) libraries;
• address the complex logistical constraints typical of urban and public service contexts.

A first case study has been carried out with AMAT – Agenzia Mobilità Ambiente Territorio di Milano, which supports the Municipality of Milan in transportation, maintenance, and urban inspection services.

With Q-PLAN, planners can integrate data on availability, skills, and operational priorities to generate optimized schedules in just seconds, far beyond the capabilities of traditional tools.

Why this project matters

European benchmarks show that over 30% of urban interventions are delayed due to inefficient planning. Industry studies estimate that adopting advanced scheduling systems can deliver operational savings of more than 20%.

With Q-PLAN, ITER IDEA aims to bridge a technological gap: no commercial resource planning platform currently integrates quantum computing.

Collaboration and outlook

ITER IDEA will have the opportunity to test Q-PLAN in real-world smart city scenarios and to collaborate with partners such as CRS4, the University of Cagliari, Abinsula, TIM, WindTre, ARTES 4.0, and many others.

The project will allow us to:

• validate the benefits of quantum computing in urban and enterprise environments;
• directly compare classical and quantum approaches;
• contribute to the digital transformation of the territory with scalable, sustainable solutions.

Conclusion

The Cagliari DLab Call4Solution is an important recognition for ITER IDEA and marks the beginning of a new phase of experimentation.

With Q-PLAN, we aim to demonstrate how even the most advanced technologies – like quantum computing – can evolve into practical, measurable tools that serve citizens, businesses, and public administrations.

We are excited to announce that ITER IDEA will participate in this year’s Government Transformation Week in London, one of the UK’s most anticipated events dedicated to innovation in public sector transformation. The event brings together a range of government bodies, tech innovators, emerging startups, and industry leaders, all working towards the goal of empowering the Public Sector with tools that drive efficiency and lead the digital transformation.

This year, ITER IDEA will showcase AIRP (AI-aided Resource Planner), our advanced resource planning solution designed to optimize workforce allocation and enhance scenario-based planning. AIRP has already been implemented in partnership with The Scottish Government’s Agricultural and Rural Economy (ARE) Division, which has significantly streamed resource planning across diverse area offices. The solution uses AI-driven insights to enable planning managers to simulate various scenarios, making it a valuable tool for aligning workforce strategies with shifting operational and business needs.

Government Transformation Week is a key forum where public sector professionals can connect with tech-driven companies to explore the latest digital tools and methodologies advancements. The event is a crucial bridge, linking startups, scale-ups, and emerging companies to the public sector and facilitating access to innovative solutions that address modern challenges.

With over 5,000 attendees expected, including government officials, tech innovators, and industry leaders, the event fosters a collaborative environment for sharing ideas, creating connections, and initiating partnerships that support public sector digital transformation. This year’s sessions will cover a range of topics, from data-driven decision-making and AI applications in government to sustainability and public service modernization.

After its launch in May 2024, 10 new B2B decided to validate our AIRP later this year.

These partners, from various sectors, aim to use AIRP’s capabilities to run scenario planning on workforce data to optimize operations and refine resource management strategies. By enabling these businesses to run up to 12 scenario plans based on real-time data, AIRP will help them adapt workforce strategies in line with operational and business objectives. With its flexible, no-code configurators and seamless integration capabilities, AIRP offers companies a user-friendly, effective way to map out constraints, project needs, and desired outcomes—all without disrupting existing systems.

The Role of Startups in Public Sector Innovation

Events like Government Transformation Week emphasise the growing role of startups and emerging tech companies in public sector innovation. As government organizations face mounting pressures to modernize while keeping pace with technological change, agile solutions from companies like ITER IDEA offer a pathway to effective and sustainable transformation.

Small and medium tech enterprises bring flexibility, adaptability, and specialized knowledge, making them ideal partners in addressing complex public sector challenges.

If you're attending Government Transformation Week, we invite you to visit us at Stand I57 to learn more about AIRP and discuss how it can support your organization’s resource planning needs.

Our team will be available to showcase the solution, answer questions, and explore ways AIRP can be tailored to enhance operational efficiency for both public and private sector partners.

Feel free to contact us directly for more details on our participation or to book a demo at the event. https://airp.link/

Less than ten months later, our commitment to supporting the use of data towards "An economy that works for people" continues with an exciting new stage of the #EuropeanYouthEvent, having been selected to participate in the first #EYE event in Italy!

During the event, We will showcase our platform's renewed look, specifically designed to offer a service through which international communities active on gender equality issues can publish, targeting women across Europe to discover qualifying study and work opportunities within certified organisations for gender equality.

The restyling of the service saw the introduction of new filters to guarantee the platform's accessibility for people with specific needs, encouraging, among others, the integration of Open Data from the Italian network of Anti-Violence Centers D.i.Re - Donne in Rete contro violence.

This milestone in the service's development path was made possible thanks to the collaboration with talented Ukrainian young women. In recent months, they have worked alongside us, leveraging their technical skills, particularly in web development and front-end, bringing expertise, passion, and vision.

Having the opportunity, with our small organization, to support the work of these women has been an honour. Once again, We are grateful for this opportunity to participate in the #EYE event and look forward to sharing our experiences and learning from other participants.

Save the date 17 to 19 May, Forlì, Italy.

Introducing IIWMS, the agile and powerful successor to the Luigi app. IIWMS is designed to efficiently and cost-effectively integrate with complex warehouse ecosystems, boosting organisations with a comprehensive suite of features tailored to enhance accuracy, cooperation and flexibility within their logistics operations.

Key Features:

• Intuitive User Interface: say goodbye to small device and screens, engage with a user-friendly interface for your warehouse staff at all levels, minimising training time and maximizing usability.
• Enhanced Inventory Management: Gain real-time visibility into inventory levels, locations, and movements. IIWMS streamlines inventory tracking, reducing errors and ensuring accurate stock counts.
• Integration Capabilities: IIWMS seamlessly integrates with existing systems, such as ERP and transportation management systems, ensuring smooth data flow across the supply chain, ERP, vertical warehouse and MES (Manufacturing Execution System).
• Mobile Accessibility: Empower warehouse staff with mobile capabilities, allowing them to access IIWMS functionality from anywhere in the warehouse, improving responsiveness,
• Customisable Workflows: Tailor IIWMS to fit your unique business processes with customisable workflows and configuration options, ensuring alignment with your specific requirements.
• Scalability: Whether you're a small warehouse or a large distribution centre, IIWMS scales effortlessly to support your growing business needs, ensuring long-term viability and scalability.
• Reliable Support: Backed by a team of dedicated support professionals, IIWMS offers reliable assistance and ongoing maintenance to ensure smooth operation and maximum uptime.

Say goodbye to inefficiencies and hello to a new era of warehouse management with IIWMS. Streamline your operations, boost productivity, and stay ahead of the competition with the agile capabilities of IIWMS. Try it today and experience the future of warehouse management.

Curious enough to discover more?

Are you interested or do you have any questions? Contact us!

Very often with the advancements dictated by Industry 4.0, traditional production planners are able to manage machine planning very precisely, while the human resource is often considered accessory.

AIRP for Manufacturing overcomes this approach, by providing a pluggable service delivering custom strategies to solve complex resource planning. The support can integrate existing Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), to extend their capabilities with cloud-based scenario modelling designed to effectively allocate resource production machinery according to the MES production cycle, considering a wide range of options that, for their nature or technologies, most MES do not currently consider when allocating human resources.

Below is a preliminary list of requirements from manufacturing companies we are helping with the tool:

• Specialisation of operators on the machine: The machine operator is linked to the type of processing (moulding, assembly, etc.)
• Machine start-up times: The availability of the resources could delay the subsequent phases.
• Time Requirements: Resources need to take a mandatory break every 4 hours, regardless of the type of machinery it operates on.
• Priority and lead time.
• Composition of shifts and expected roles (Shift Manager, Tool Operators, Supervisor, Fire Prevention, First Aid).
• Number of operators per shift: The number of operators tends to be balanced to efficiency and utilisation.
• Physical abilities.

All the constraints above are oftentimes managed outside the production scheduler software, oftentimes even for a company with 50 employees, facing significant limitations in identifying optimisation patterns and new strategies for allocating resources.

The solution gives organisations a better overview of their workforce, skills, and availabilities and predicts future bottlenecks, training needs and critical profiles according to manufacturing demands.

Every scenario produced by AIRP states each resource's pressure maps, is designed to monitor and balancing workload, ensuring that resources are more likely to be allocated efficiently. As a result, manufacturers can quickly re-prioritise their production when needed without relaunching MES estimation or time-consuming Excel re-calculations.

Below is a short list of objectives that are built-in in AIRP:

• Planning by delivery date (soft, hard contracts).
• Plan to optimise turnover constraint.
• Plan to complete the number of hours of holidays and permits.
• Plan to optimise the cost.
• Shifts management.

The shift management enables the organisation smoothly customised the required constraints and the optimisation rules to integrate and just let the AIRP algorithms guide them in discovering the monthly or weekly shift schedule.

Familiar with these challenges? Let's explore your use case!

We at ITER IDEA were present as the first stage of a series of international events in which we will participate, starting from ProcureX Scotland in Glasgow and Web Summit in Lisbon.

This whirlwind tour signifies a commitment to staying up-to-date with AI developments and showcasing our latest solutions.

AWS and startups at WSAI 2023

One of the most anticipated sessions at WSAI was "AI for Now" led by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Service, a leading figure in cloud computing and always highly motivational for our journey as a company.
Since 2015, with his Two-pizza teams theory, a concept that contributed to the process of defining our own ITER group when switched from 10 resources to an organisation of almost 40 professionals.

At WSAI 2023,

Vogels delved into insights into the evolving landscape of AI and cloud technology, conveying to attention the innovations already available in the ecosystem of startups operating with AWS.

In his slides, Vogels states we don't have a crystal ball to predict the future, but today, we have the tools to imagine the possibilities.

The event saw discussions surrounding the EU AI Act, the first regulation on artificial intelligence.

The EU AI Act aims to ensure that AI technologies are developed and used in a manner that respects fundamental human rights, values, and ethics. It also addresses transparency, accountability, data usage, safety, traceability, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly concerns.

This is a new factor of attention compared to the past for all businesses with the ambition to enter the European market with AI-powered solutions.

The importance of compliance with current legislation also impacts the evaluation of startups themselves and the possibilities of marketing the products themselves.

We ended the two days by thanking the Enterprise Europe Network (EEN), who joined us in the event with delegates from the Dutch division.

The EEN has worked as a partner of ITER IDEA in significant data-driven and AI initiatives of recent years, such as the EU Datathon, REACH Incubator and Eurostars.

Our dedicated professionals have successfully earned 3 new AWS certifications (for a total of 8!),

reinforcing our commitment to staying at the forefront of technology to serve our partners and projects better.

Among these accomplishments, we are particularly proud to announce that members of our team have attained certifications as AWS Certified Developer Associate and AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate. These certifications are not just badges of honour; they signify a deep understanding and mastery of Amazon Web Services tools and best practices.

AWS Certified Developer Associate

This certification validates the ability to design, build, and deploy scalable and resilient applications on the cloud. It showcases their proficiency in various programming languages, understanding of AWS Software Development Kits (SDKs), and expertise in implementing security best practices.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate

This certification reflects our team's capability to design distributed systems on the AWS cloud, considering factors like scalability, security, and cost-effectiveness. It highlights their skills in creating well-architected solutions that meet the needs of today's dynamic business environment.

In an era where digital transformation is accelerating, AWS certifications have become instrumental in demonstrating a professional's cloud expertise. AWS, being a global leader in cloud services, sets industry standards for cloud computing, and its certifications are widely recognized as a mark of proficiency and dedication.

What this means for our customers and projects

We are equipped to deliver top-notch solutions on the cloud, ensuring that our clients benefit from cutting-edge technology, efficiency, and scalability. Moreover, our team is better positioned to architect, develop, and optimize serverless-based platforms tailored to the unique needs of each project.

As we celebrate the achievements of our team members, we remain committed to continuous learning and excellence, to propel our projects to new heights. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue our journey of empowering innovation in the world of cloud computing!

Our team is working with the Scottish Government's Rural Payments and Inspections Division (RPID), which is responsible for administering rural payments and services in Scotland. RPID's current resource planning, allocation, management, and reporting system is heavily manual and labor-intensive, making it inflexible and static. The department needs a more dynamic and agile system that can respond to changing workloads, resources, and deadlines, and match the right resources with the right skills to meet those demands.

"How can technology help drive effective resource management for a multi-skilled workforce in a constantly changing environment?"

ITER IDEA is developing a cloud-based Resource Planner (RP) that is highly configurable, easy-to-use, and accessible from common browsers or mobile devices.

An efficient tool capable of updating changes to the resource management systems in real-time, allowing dynamic reallocation of work and resources as priorities and staff movement change. The new system will report in real-time, providing timely and automated management information to enable specific planning activities. The system will also be quality assured, able to reconcile allocated resources to resources actually engaged or deployed, which will enhance the prediction capability of the solution.

The first benchmarks are showing surprising results

The new solution solves complex allocation problems in seconds, and when compared to the current 4+ minute processing time of a single scenario using the current Excel spreadsheet based system, users from over 16 Area Offices in Scotland, are eager to try it!

But it is not only about time-saving; the new tool will open new awareness regarding forecasting pressure points, managing rotations, task assignments, deadlines, and budgets in multi-skilled teams.

AIRP generates plans to solve demand using predictive modelling, aligning business goals, planning rules, and workforce skills in seconds.

How this can be so fast?

AIRP is a cloud-native technology leverages the IDEA Cloud technology stack, a scalable, serverless architecture built upon the Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has been refined over seven years of delivering internationally awarded data-driven services.

Our dedicated team can build organisation-specific prediction models when setting up a new organisation, which takes approximately three weeks.
These models are then migrated to the cloud and optimised to work on our distributed architecture. Following this process, we can fully exploit the computational advantage compared to a typical Excel approach on-premise.

Resource planning is a core activity for many organisations since a string of small resource planning problems that may seem minor initially but can often lead to significant budget concerns and issues.

Helping planners to complete their work as best as possible requires adequate tools.

As we look toward the support workforce, ITER IDEA remains committed to know more partners and give a first talk on technology can support multi-skilled teams and facilitate their work. Discover more on airp.link!

CivTech is a "Scottish Government programme that brings people from the public, private and third sectors together to build things that make the world a better place". We started our journey within the program last January; since then, we rapidly developed a new solution guided by a continuous cycle of feedback and improvement in collaboration with our Challenge Sponsor from the Scottish Government. Roughly six months later, we finally had the chance to present the outcome of our efforts.

The event was attended by Richard Lochhead, MSP, Minister for Small Business, Trade, and Innovation, with whom we had the chance to showcase our product and share our vision.

Our Guido Mazza delivered an impressive presentation of our solution to the eyes of many other companies, government representatives and investors from all over the UK.

AIRP - Resource Planner is a powerful platform designed to support multi-skilled teams in solving complex resource planning challenges. Recognizing the limitations of manual and static resource planning processes, AIRP offers a dynamic and intuitive solution that adapts to evolving workloads, resources, and deadlines. By leveraging advanced technology, AIRP revolutionizes resource management by providing prompt what-if computations, flexible mapping of custom constraints, and actionable widgets and optimization strategies.

The demand for Advanced Planning Software is on the rise, with the market projected to reach $3 billion within the next five years. This surge encompasses various sectors, both private and public. With AIRP's innovative capabilities, we are well-positioned to seize this opportunity and introduce our solution to the UK market. Through our collaboration with the Scottish Government, we aim to showcase the benefits of AIRP, building trust and credibility while supporting new public sector organizations. Our goal is to establish long-term sustainability and enable efficient resource management across sectors.

While leaving you with Richard Lochhead's words, stay tuned for future updates on AIRP's next steps!

“Today’s demonstrations will show how successful these ideas can be. This is exactly the kind of creative thinking we want to encourage through our National Innovation Strategy".

Hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), the summit showcased the latest advancements in cloud technology and provided a platform for companies like ITER IDEA to network, learn, and share insights.

The event included a myriad of sessions, workshops, and hands-on labs covering a broad spectrum of topics, from artificial intelligence and machine learning to serverless computing and Internet of Things (IoT).

For us, it was a unique opportunity to connect with the technology community and gain insights into the latest advancements; it ultimately inspired us to push the boundaries further of what's possible with cloud technology.

As we look toward the future, ITER IDEA remains committed to harnessing the potential of AWS and other cloud providers to deliver groundbreaking solutions to our partners. Do you have a cool idea? Let's build it together!

It is a unique opportunity for girls and boys aged 16 to 30 to interact, inspire each other and exchange their views with experts, activists, influencers and decision-makers right in the heart of European democracy.

EYE2023, the fifth edition of the event, took place on 9 and 10 June in live and online mode in Strasbourg.

Among the projects presented and discussed in front of the prestigious public, our UNA Women was also selected as an observation and study case at the European level regarding using open data to create an innovative and egalitarian economy for women.

The embryonic solution of the platform, designed to support the recovery of female mobility after the Covid-19 pandemic, began its journey with a double prize at the EU Datathon 2021 contest in the categories "An economy that works for people" and "Most voted app by the public".

Months later, the motivation to contribute our technology to a better future for women remains a driving force.

Among the initiatives planned, there will be various workshops at universities and associations in favour of female empowerment, the restyling of the platform and the presence at various institutional events of the sectors concerned.

“What matters most to us, in addition to providing qualitatively valid opportunities for young women, is to create a community that can be reflected in our own values and that is able to act as a community to address problems such as the gender gap. Following this aim, we are starting to create a communication asset made up of physical events, a website and social networks to bring our message to the general public in a simple and stimulating way. Realizing that you can act on problems that seem insurmountable is the first step to seeing change.” – concludes our Sara Baroni.

We are excited to share the launch of a brand new collaboration with IlMattoncinoColorato.it and their six stores!

Elevate your shopping experience by combining the potential of e-commerce with the uniqueness of an in-store visit.

Welcome to MattoncinoStore,

the app designed to guide users to discover new ways to approach the store without losing the convenience of online shopping.

Discover a World of Possibilities

Explore a vast collection of exclusive products, out rare or discontinued sets, collectables, and so much more.

Seamless Online Shopping

Browse, select, and purchase your favorite collectables and Lego sets through our intuitive and user-friendly app. Enjoy the convenience of online payments, hassle-free transactions, and secure delivery to your doorstep or click-and-collect.

Unleash In-Store Excitement

Step into the world of brick-and-mortar stores like never before. Mattoncino app enhances your in-store experience by providing real-time updates, interactive maps, and product availability notifications.

Digital Fidelity Card

Forget about carrying physical loyalty cards! MattoncinoStore offers a digital Fidelity Card, ensuring you enjoy exclusive rewards and special discounts tailored to your preferences. Simply scan the QRCode at checkout, and watch your rewards stack up!

Gamified Rewards

Engage in fun and innovative gamification methodologies within the app. Earn points, badges, and unlock special achievements as you explore, purchase, and interact with the collectables and the community. Let the thrill of the game accompany your shopping adventures.

Join the MattoncinoStore Community

Connect with like-minded collectors, Lego enthusiasts, and passionate sellers. Share your latest finds, discuss rare items, and be part of an inclusive community that shares your passion for collectables. Exchange knowledge, stories, and expand your network.

Attention Store Owners

MattoncinoStore can deliver its full potential to any store or point of sale. If you know a store that would benefit from our app, we're all ears! Let us know, and we'll bring the exciting experiences to even more collectors and shoppers.

In particular, we were chosen to address Challenge 8.2: effective resource management for a multi-skilled Workforce. At ITER IDEA, we specialise in developing cutting-edge software solutions in the world of process optimisation. We bring our expertise to provide businesses with an intelligent resource planning tool that leverages AI technology to optimise resource allocation and maximise given objectives.

Technology has the power to streamline operations and improve efficiency, and we are passionate about creating solutions that make a difference for many.

To match the objectives, we will take advantage of the latest advances in machine learning to build a platform specially designed to help multi-purpose and dynamic teams with numerous resources to plan work, set their indicators and perform complex calculations.

The focus is on identifying the optimal mix of skills and experience required for a given task or project, solving complex constraints problems in seconds, ensuring each organisation the degree of customisation it needs to map its constraints, in a no-code fashion.

The ultimate objective is to power organisations' management with the appropriate tool to improve allocation strategies, reducing the pressure on resources with predictive capabilities and simultaneously effectively chasing business purposes, overcoming current limitations of the most used tools, such as Excel:

• Requires technical skills in coding macro functions
• Comes with a long learning curve which makes it difficult to transfer knowledge
• As the number of data increases, the performance degrades
• Do not provide predictive capabilities
• It is not integrated with IT ecosystems

We are delighted to work alongside CivTech and other stakeholders, committed to making a positive impact, and our work on Challenge 8.2 is just the beginning.

If you are interested in learning more about the product, join ITER IDEA in Edinburgh for our Demo Day on Tuesday 27th June 2023 or you can always get in touch to find out how we can help you organisation.

We would love to hear from you!

We are thrilled to be settling into our new home, which offers a more comfortable and efficient workspace for our team. Our new office is designed to foster collaboration and creativity, with an open layout that encourages communication and idea-sharing.

But our move isn't just about us - it's about you too! We would like to invite all our partners and anyone interested in what we do to come and visit us. We love meeting new people and learning about their projects and ideas, and we think our new space will be the perfect place to do just that.

So if you're in the Modena area, please feel free to stop by and say hello! We're always happy to chat and share our expertise. And if you're interested in working with us, we'd be glad to show you around and discuss how we can help you turn your ideas into reality.

We look forward to seeing you soon at our new office!

WomenX Impact is an organization that has promoted female empowerment for years, encouraging topics such as gender equality and personal growth paths through mentorship programs and a dynamic group of Ambassadors in Italy, the UK and Belgium.

Values ​​and aspects that have guided the choice of our projects,

as our winning platform of the EU Datathon 21 contest, in November 2021.

The event engaged exceptional guests with high-impact speeches, such as those proposed by representatives of the European Commission, who wanted to underline the need to continue the commitment to Sustainable Development Goals, including Gender equality.

Among the events organized, there was also a workshop in which we were the protagonists. Indeed, we had the pleasure of conducting an in-depth study entitled "Women in coding", focused on the importance of digital skills in the world in which we live.

Among the topics addressed, greater female participation in STEM subjects could respond to the more than 700,000 positions currently open in Europe in digital subjects.

During the seminar, we also presented the new and wholly renewed interface of UNA Women.

We were arousing the interest of the participants who could touch our platform's power and scalability.

The solution supports users, particularly young women, in discovering and exploring the most suitable European opportunities based on their professional and non-professional characteristics or desires.

The platform analyzes and aggregates millions of information collected from European Open Data, from Institutes and partner companies that have decided to support the cause and share valuable data with us for users. Among the parameters elaborated by the algorithms, those analyzed by the World Economic Forum in 146 economies: Work, Education and Support.

UNA Women was included, among over one hundred proposals, among the ten finalists of the Startup Competition of the event.

At the end of the three days, Sara Baroni presented in front of an audience of business experts, investors and over 300 participants.

We believe that technologies such as IDEA Cloud and solutions such as UNA Women can become part of how new generations will soon discover new educational and professional opportunities: enhancing, data-driven, and aligned with their ideals.

Every day young people show us how attentive they are to respecting the principles they believe in, including gender equality, and less and less inclined to realities that are distant from their way of thinking.

All this promotes a world of limitless opportunities and moves large organizations, such as those present at WomenX Impact 2022, to review their procedures, such as HR, and accelerate certification processes.

To crown this important week, our project has been included in the first The Use Case Observatory

We believe that the long path to gender equality passes through people, meetings and events like these. Do you share our values ​​and are you interested in collaborating with us?

Take the online and in-store experience to a new dimension.

Imagine being able to renew the way customers interact with the physical space of your store.

We're not talking about visors or smart glasses, or at least not yet.

But of something much faster, accessible and, above all, ready to be integrated sustainably into the current customer journey and common e-commerce sites.

The possibilities of online shopping platforms are nowadays wide but little differentiating.

Our value is to answer questions actively:

How can we engage customers who are returning to physical in-store visits?

or

How to enable new possibilities for users to have a seamless, omnichannel experience capable of synchronizing data with a wide range of traditional e-commerce?

In-store experiences and gamification tools are getting exciting results in terms of engagement and number of iterations, some examples?

85%  of customers prefer to pay with store credit

2.5x  increase in orders paid with credits value

+40%  total in-store customer engagement

We start from online payments to the digital Fidelity Card, reaching more advanced gamification methodologies.

Our service can deliver the potentialities to any store or point of sale.

We designed a mobile app ready to offer the finest experience to visitors who can enjoy a high-performance UX fully comparable with the high standards of the apps we are all used to shopping with daily.

A cross-platform service is available for any iOS and Android customer's mobile.

Let your visitors be captivated by the app designed to guide them to discover new ways to approach the store without losing the convenience of online shopping.

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To support public administrations and municipalities employed in achieving their targets and guiding strategies, scalable technologies, cloud-native applications and data processing take on a decisive weight. And this is where POInt&Go, a finalist for REACH Incubator, comes into play.

Our cities generate large amounts of data during everyday activities: from what tourists are more interested in, how citizens move and from the continuous monitoring via the sensors in smart cities. Therefore, a complex architecture of suppliers, users, infrastructures and administrations represents a perfect example of Data Value Chains (DVCs): information exchanged between entities and stakeholders generates social and economic value for the industries involved.

POInt&Go will soon begin to support public administrations and municipalities in collecting and displaying information from service providers to improve cooperation within the city. By simplifying the methods of sharing such data, we could monitor how users interact with services such as the cultural experiences offered to tourists or how citizens live the new shared and multimodal mobility models.

Interesting topics that we explored with the support of Dott, in the last Smart City Now 2022 in Milan on 21 June.

So let's find out how these themes are connected to our REACH project, returning to our journey into European smart communities.

Previously we discussed the beginning of the smart European communities in the French capital. The second and third stages will touch on an equally significant destination in the context of European innovation: the city of Bilbao. Bilbao is home to one of the continent's most prestigious universities, home to an inclusive Business School, namely Universidad de Deusto.
In addition to the university, it hosts attractions rich in cultural interest, such as the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

In this suggestive scenario, an intensive week of technical and mentorship sessions took place. The workshops enabled us to deepen the requirements of the MVP proposal, which will be presented again in Bilbao in the final on 28-29 September.

During the intense week of priceless activities, we met stakeholders and data providers, such as the Spanish company Play&Go Experience.

The company specializes in developing applications powered with augmented reality capabilities, mainly focused on tourist destinations, encouraging the involvement of visitors.

Together we will find out how POInt&Go will support during upcoming events and in the testing phase on tourist and cultural attractions.

Among the exciting workshops are those of the Valencian company ITI specializing in research and solutions in machine learning and artificial intelligence. The consultants have provided us with an overview of the tools available to generate value from the data processed by our platform.

It was, besides, truly enlightening to discover how IDEA Cloud technologies and cloud-native and serverless paradigms can be combined with the innovative offer of European research centres. For example, among the most surprising services, we find the Anonymizer, the result of decades of innovation in anonymising sensitive data currently adopted in hospitals and research centres in the health sector around the world.

Protecting sensitive data is invaluable for security and transparency in a Data Value Chain that makes sharing between different markets the central aspect of the business model.

On the other hand, in ITER IDEA, we find these topics more than actual in our projects and collaborations in Digital Health areas.

We conclude this week in Bilbao with a decidedly enriched baggage of cutting-edge technologies, municipalities ready to experiment and partners interested in the value of the proposal: strategic drivers for POInt&Go and the creation of a new ecosystem suitable for the needs of smart communities.

This determination has led us to reach hundreds of communities in Europe with over tens of thousands of users who, thanks to services such as Papaya, can improve their way of integrating into new communities, such as a new university, to start living an extraordinary life experience.

By pursuing this path, we have recently achieved another important recognition for our work and cloud technology.

ITER IDEA was chosen for the final stages of REACH Incubator, a selection process that began with over 125 innovative companies from all over the world.

Among the objectives of the program is to promote safe, scalable and reliable solutions able to favour the cooperation of multiple stakeholders operating in different markets, in conditions of uncertainty and lack of transparency.

The combination of cloud design, distributed architectures, predictive algorithms, security measures, interoperability standards and other enabling technologies are summarized in the concept of Data Value Chain, hereinafter the official definition provided by REACH Incubator.

A Data Value Chains (DVCs) can be defined as a multi-stakeholder data-driven business model where data is securely exchanged between the different parties, whether they are people or organizations, with the aim of creating value among all stakeholders involved.

Among the objectives of a Data Value Chain is also the possibility of authentically certifying the data generated by an organization or company, which operates in an environment with many interested parties, such as a smart community.

Analysis of different markets, know-how in working with quantities of data and new technologies represent a strategic combination to promote IDEA Cloud as the right platform for this challenge and generate, thanks to a network of partners, added value for communities beyond the boundary of the European project.

POInt&Go starts precisely here, a new solution designed to fill the information gap in the world of smart communities, in detail public administrations and municipalities with their suppliers, or those companies that operate by creating innovative and digital services for citizens and tourists.

The scope is to provide additional tools to monitor the quality of the services offered by service providers and encourage trusted interactions between partners and public administration. In addition, our technology will support European companies, scale-ups and the REACH Incubator program to explore the movement flows of tourists and citizens and their social perception of urban spaces to enable data-driven decision-making. As an initial target, we addressed pilot municipalities in Spain, particularly rich in innovative services and digital experiences.

To improve the chance of success, a delegation of experts from the REACH Incubator Consortium conducted in-depth analyzes of our cloud architecture, verifying its compliance with shared standards. After this preliminary phase, we had the opportunity to show the core of our solution in front of the international jury during an intense elevator pitch session.

The event was hosted at the Cea List - Nano-Innov, one of the three institutes of the technological research division of the CEA (French Commission for Alternative Energy and Atomic Energy) and the headquarters of EIT Manufacturing, a reference program for industrial innovation. in Europe.

This image contains the thrill of moving from theory to practice when it comes to pitching: an experience that, as technology and innovation enthusiasts, we recommend to all those who work to transform their ideas into reality.

We reached the first milestone of our incubation program, and we will transform our slides and our design into a cloud-native application in the next four months, embarking on a path of growth and international collaboration.

The trip will continue in Bilbao at the facilities of the University of Deusto, where we will meet collaborators, mentors and project managers who will support us in creating the first MVP to reach many smart communities in Europe soon.

What we just introduced in this blog post explains why we often use the word travel because talking about a simple project would be too limiting.

POInt&Go responds to the challenge of enriching data from the Play&Go experience with valuable information from external sources and social platforms in a new Data Value Chain designed for public administration officers and companies struggling to improve the quality of the experiences offered in their cities. How could they make smarter decisions for the future of public areas? How do they improve mobility or attractiveness? Which augmented experiences were more successful in the past or led to better results in other cities?

POInt&Go is a geolocated view showing Points of Interest from the augmented experiences. The Point (check-in) will be equipped with powerful indicators, such as aggregate ratings calculated by analysing users’ interactions and comments through sentiment analysis services in near real-time. Through POInt&Go, the target users can take actions related to an event or place directly in the app, obtain a new way to involve strategic partners, and enjoy a unified dashboard integrated with location technology platforms.

The project has been selected inside the REACH incubator program for the category "Social and Induced Perception of The Tourist Territorial Resources of a Destination".

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🥚 Point&Go on REACH

the event boosted new connections and ideas, creating new paths towards mobility experiences and international careers.

Almost two years ago, I was asked to collaborate with the event's organisation to lead a small group of skilful (Portuguese) volunteers in providing IT tools and support. Due to EGM's nature, size, and attractiveness, the answer was immediately positive: what a compelling challenge!

In between other tasks, our team's main focus was to provide the event's participants with an application that could help them get to know and enjoy the Erasmus Generation Meeting at its fullest.

After several weeks of work, we finally published the EGM app.

To reach as many participants as possible, regardless of their devices, we opted for a web application as a front interface. Similarly, to ensure high availability and scalability, for an app that was forecasted to be intensively used by a thousand people, we carefully designed a cloud infrastructure built on the Amazon Web Services.

The event included about a hundred different sessions spread over three days and simultaneously hosted in distinct locations. Naturally, one of the application's main features needed to grant the user an overview of the contents of the event, with the capability of easily building a customised agenda.

Moreover, since the main event was spread inside a vast venue composed of several floors, the participants needed a way to orient within the building to find the correct rooms. That's why we added internal maps to guide the users all along.

The app was also the perfect showcase of the event's organisations and speakers. Hence, the participants used the tool to acquire a complete understanding of each party involved, with multiple ways of getting in touch with them.

Due to the networking nature of the event, we equipped the solution with social features to allow the participants to search themselves and connect in order to access each other's contacts.

The Erasmus Generation Meeting also included several other moments and celebrations, like a captivating flag parade, a gala dinner and more. Therefore, we added a fully-navigable map to help the participants reach the correct venues. Finally, the app contained a news area to keep the participants up to date with critical communications, tips and helpful information.

The feedback of both participants and partners about the app was great, and we appreciated an adoption rate of almost 100% of the target. Data-wise, it was interesting to observe how people accessed the service before and during the event. For example, the graph here below clearly shows how the participants started to use the app in the morning of each day to prepare for their favourite sessions, with peaks during mid-day, and a fewer (but not null) utilisation overnight, where they could take advantage of the map and the organisers' communications.

Of course, the team took advantage of ITER IDEA's cloud competencies and best practices

to ensure the design of an optimised, scalable and sustainable solution.

Among other appreciable results, the entire serverless architecture had a final cost of less than 1€ for the whole event.

It has been, indeed, an incredible experience. Porto granted a magical atmosphere,  between the traditional and the modern, that added something more to the whole emprise. I had the chance to work with a fantastic group of people who were able to create an unforgettable event for a new generation of creators and innovators. Thanks to all of you! Last but not least, it was the perfect occasion to discover youthful talents to add to ITER IDEA's team: we may have some good news very soon!

Are you also interested in working with us? We can't wait to meet you!

This post combines our experience in adapting our architecture with the studies conducted by Datadog. The latter underlines the increase in the adoption of these methods of execution among organizations all over the world.

Today millions of serverless functions power the business of thousands of companies that have made it the core of the development stack and source of competitive advantage.

On average, the serverless workload increased by more than 300% compared to the previous two years.

The analysis reveals how Amazon Web Services leads the industry: AWS Lambda is the most mature and widely used product today. At the same time, other big players are catching up with services like Azure Functions and Google Cloud Functions.

Mastering state-of-the-art technologies is not a secondary aspect since, like in any other market, competition favours those who know these tools.

Among the success factors of the general adoption by businesses worldwide, the study highlights the ability to have drastically reduced the duration of execution of the functions by designing them to be highly specific to their workloads, not general purpose.

Designing a specific execution for the purpose is one of the determining factors for the sustainability objectives.

Question time

Can Lambda functions only solve simple problems?

No. Serverless developers teams use Lambda even in computationally intensive workloads through the orchestration of multiple services. An example would be the Step Functions service in the AWS world: this enables coordination of functions execution in distributed environments. In this way, teams can build event-driven platforms that may involve hundreds of parts and other external services.

How do adoption trends favour ITER IDEA's work?

ITER IDEA has structured its platform orchestrating services that enable serverless (cloud-native) architectures rather than cloud-hosted designs or services based on dedicated instances. After many improvements cycles, our current skeleton is built upon a few key elements:

• We design asynchronous event-driven solutions that are not subject to the typical limits of sequential or concurrent executions.
• We create specific frameworks, software, and procedures to control modular and independent cloud resources within complex systems.
• We use automatic code scanning tools for optimizing dependencies between packages (proprietary and third-party) and identifying security risks.
• We choose modular and end-to-end monitoring of cloud architectures involving multiple services of various kinds; this leads to consequent optimizations in terms of configurations and provisioning.
• We adopt different forms of Infrastructure as Code to maintain complete control over cloud resources, avoid waste or ghost entities, and reproduce entire "copy" environments as needed for testing or scalability objectives.
• We implement CD / CI pipelines for the efficiency of the development and integration process, which guarantees faster, more accurate and more aware releases.
• We take advantages of different types of communication and messaging protocols (HTTPS, socket, MQTT, stream, etc.) that adapt to the context of specific applications, ensuring effective communication – not oversized or redundant.
• More importantly, we continuously improve internal dev-ops processes in line with the latest and most innovative standards.

In closing, we would like to incentivize the new generation of developers to boost and refine their cloud specialization journey.

How do we embrace this change, and how will the developers of tomorrow be ready for the following technological challenges?

First, it's essential to know the terminology of cloud computing, starting from one of the words that are particularly close to our hearts: Cloud Native.

Cloud-Native solutions are those applications specifically designed and deployed to get the maximum competitive advantage out of cloud service providers; they are resilient, sustainable, scalable, and flexible to future updates.

Serverless execution allows obtaining the full scalability of decentralized solutions and is the most efficient way to develop cloud-native applications fast. Indeed, it enables developers and IT teams to focus more on the solution's value. Similarly, by resuming Datadog's analysis, mastering these technologies will allow teams a sensational speed-up and a general reduction of stress due to the management of the underlying architectures.

These practices will be perceived as commodities with low added value in the future.

In cloud computing, the serverless landscape represents the trend of the near future; IDEA Cloud proposes itself to be a strategic tool to start a solid specialization path for young developers.

In this general overview, it's essential to consider the challenges that modern applications face when approaching innovative features and how managed services bring key benefits to the success of these solutions.

As also reported by Forbes in this article, the transition from test to production is highly delicate, and even the best and most accurate models very often fail when they collide with real cases.

The causes are manifold.

First, unlike traditional software applications for which there is a tendency to move on to the next project after the actual release, specialists must remain connected to the AI applications delivered. The nature of these solutions requires, in fact, continuous monitoring of the performance and accuracy of the predictions for subsequent reinforcement learning processes.

Such systems need to remain trained to avoid model deterioration and decrease in accuracy over time. Unfortunately, in many cases, changes in the production data — compared to the information used for training, leads to inevitable failures. For example, the target of an application turns out to be different from the one assumed in the design, making the trained model unusable or ineffective.

The need for these models to be functional in a production environment drives Machine Learning professionals to use managed services and tools. On AWS (Amazon Web Services), this is the case with Amazon Sagemaker.

One of the factors for preferring a managed service is the possibility of accessing pre-trained models with an exponentially more significant number of data collected during the training phase. This process results in models more resilient to the uncertainty of production data.

Let's now see some cases of AI applications within ITER IDEA solutions and how these allow us to overcome new limits.

In a previous blog post, we showed how Scarlett could "listen" and accurately transcribe the intervention reports of mobile technicians through integration with voice interfaces.

Guided by the needs of our customers engaged in interventions abroad, we have also added the ability to speak several languages, using services based on neural networks. Scarlett is, therefore, able to provide precise translations in the language of our partners' clients, who can confirm the intervention report by understanding the details of the activity carried out. Furthermore, reinforcement learning techniques allow the technical dictionary to improve over time, producing increasingly more accurate results.

Today our platform translates over 3000 intervention reports each year.

The desire to amaze our customers and partners by solving real business challenges has pushed us to take further steps in textual content analysis, introducing new Sentiment Analysis features in our solutions. The procedure involves several stages that we simplify below: tokenization of words to divide them into "bags-of-words", elimination of stop-words and terms that do not bring added value and, finally, semantic analysis to categorize the relevant information for the polarization of the sentiment expressed by the sentence within the context.

The integration of this form of intelligence to support commercial agents in their visits allows one to analyze the textual content following the commercial activities and automatically map customer mood and negotiation status based on recent visits.

For a data-driven company, this data results in a significant strategic advantage, because it can be intertwined with other commercial information, such as turnover, number of visits, frequency of appointments, products involved, and other indicators defined by business intelligence tools.

Finally, the last case is exceptionally current for us and concerns the use of Deep Learning algorithms for image analysis.

Deep Learning algorithms used in image recognition typically use CNN (Convolutional Neural Network); these networks can include hundreds and even thousands of layers. They are specially designed (and trained) to provide a sensational speed-up in receiving information from images and recognizing features from the pixels of the figures — for example, the position of objects, automatic moderation of explicit content, etc.

While investigating the potential of these Deep Learning algorithms, we decided to create a first POC (Proof-of-Concept): an application capable of analyzing and understanding paper documents. In addition to extending the capabilities of OCR (Optical Character Recognition) systems, the service allows you to recognize a wide range of documents in a structured way, through solid, resistant and suitably pre-trained models.

In this case, the tagline could only be:

Our take of AI applied to real business cases is linear: it is an extraordinary opportunity to overcome the limitations of previous systems and enable new perspectives.

Thus, the invitation is to investigate the potential of these technologies to equip your business with the tools necessary to stay resilient, overcome current limits and be ready for the challenges of tomorrow.

In addressing complex challenges in cooperation with cross-functional and multi-cultural teams, we have noticed how specific methodologies were even more effective when supported by a motivational component brought by the consultants to all workgroups.

This aspect, often linked to the so-called corporate culture, was perceived by all the parties involved in every project phase — in every minor or significant action.

Strengthened by these experiences, we started to identify and transmit a series of values within our own organization, well aware of their effectiveness in improving the process and the outcome of any activity. Recently, we had the opportunity to discuss this topic with some young leaders of the associations' sector.

Today, we want to highlight some of the characteristics linked to corporate culture, technology and people, which are distinctive in companies that, like us, aim to be relevant in the coming years.

In the current scenario,

tech companies are urged by a constant need for new solutions; the market stimulates many opportunities, which allow them to grow rapidly and experiment.

This favourable background highlights the need to quickly mature the skills necessary to face the complexities of new challenges —consequently, the necessity to remain attractive to talents, which must be continuously motivated and stimulated.

In other words, companies will have to transfer what they have learned in the relationship with customers to their internal resources, implementing specific strategies for them:

• create projects you can believe in,
• encourage the generation of actionable ideas,
• favour retrospective and continuous improvement of processes,
• share roadmaps and the reasons that guide particular choices,
• respect and monitor the goals of individuals.

To stay in our field, here's a well-known example to all IT companies: resolving a customer's request. Of course, providing the best solution to a request is rarely a deterministic process – a single path: there are often different approaches, each with its facets.

Choosing one path rather than the other defines a partner's working practices and is indeed an opportunity to transmit one's corporate culture and stimulate internal resources. Often, you can find the best solution by asking yourself why a request was made - what is the real need that you have to solve.

In some cases, correctly defining the reason for the new functionality allows you to enable new business models, create new services and strengthen trust with customers and collaborators.

Oftentimes, it's possible to design solutions by approaching the problem from new points of view, bringing suitable, modular and reusable technologies to light. Furthermore, from a motivational point of view, this allows the team to develop skills and assimilate new techniques, such as Design Thinking.

This process, which sometimes requires a more significant investment, would not be possible if we looked at the request from a traditional perspective: we will probably end up resorting to repetitive tasks and producing undifferentiated work without any added value in the long term.

These scenarios are commonplace in IT consulting activities, and cloud platforms often offer strategic solutions to change perspective, ensuring tangible results.

In ITER IDEA, the motivational value of a project is a determining parameter in selecting the initiatives in which to invest with technology and resources.

The recent victory at the EU Datathon 2021 contest is an example. We created a service to support female mobility: Wonder Wanderlust Women; the platform offers our target an aggregate of relevant information, coming from European open data, to consciously select the next destination in Europe, based on the profile and the opportunities gathered.

Our belief in the value of mobility as personal growth resulted also in the design of

Papaya, a matching system appreciated over the years by over 30k students of the Erasmus program.

Furthermore, let's not forget the recent collaboration with Dott's international partners in sustainable urban mobility.

In the field of Digital Health, we digitalized the work of over 50 professionals involved in the national territory in training patients for diabetic treatments and pain therapies. Similarly, we are studying new applications in partnership with qualified medical personnel, private clinics and teachers from various Italian universities to offer innovative services to local communities.

Finally, we mention the recent cooperations in the Insurtech and Retail sectors that aim to create new services full of imaginative ideas, promoting opportunities in line with future potential in highly dynamic scenarios.

Real innovation is made of culture, ideas, and methodologies that start within the organization and are shared in affinity with collaborators and customers, who will benefit from a renewed and stimulating work experience.

• Using methodologies in our design process to create concrete advantages for thousands of SME users who digitize their work with our cloud products.
• Following "new" principles foretold to be enablers of the next generation of business applications. One of these?

Fostering an ecosystem of interconnected, specialized and highly scalable microservices — versus monolithic solutions.

The study conducted by Gartner investigates the sudden changes in the companies' needs that force IT organizations to innovate faster and dynamically adapt their applications. Therefore, the reuse of skills and resources inside and outside the organization is one of the enabling factors. Consequently, a best practice becomes the design of interchangeable, modular components that cooperate efficiently in dynamic and complex systems – similarly to Lego bricks.

In other words, we are referring to “composable enterprise”,

another step towards innovation that demarcates new leadership models and the adoption of advanced technological platforms. This new architecture makes organizations more resilient and increases the likelihood of success in uncertain scenarios.

Back to Gartner's analysis, a composable business thrives on four pillars:

• high speed through discovery,
• greater agility through modularity,
• better leadership through cooperation,
• resilience through autonomy.

Above these pillars, there are three fundamental principles for a modular business:

• Modular thinking: it fosters creativity and helps to compose coherently by combining the principles of modularity, autonomy, cooperation and discovery.
• Modular business architectures: ensure that organizations, like the solutions they adopt, are flexible and resilient, thanks to structural capabilities that support business operations.
• Modular technologies: represented by parts, modules and everything that connects them. These are the base tools to achieve composable businesses.

How is ITER IDEA's proposal in line with the projections for next-generation business applications?

At ITER IDEA, we design applications and processes by taking advantage of the most complete and innovative offer of cloud services on the market.

We integrate the best cloud providers services into a single, highly-optimized and efficient platform, making these opportunities available instantly and perfectly interoperable with each other.

The platform allows you to mask the underlying infrastructure's complexity to innovate faster.

Sure enough, agility remains one of the strategic keys for modular applications built to be scalable, secure, and able to access innovative functionalities through the integration of AI technologies such as machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.

Technological challenges like never before.

Above, you can appreciate an ecosystem of ITER IDEA applications designed to digitalize and enhance business processes: from the receipt of B2B orders to warehouse flows, from updates on the status of shipments towards end customers to the digitization of after-sales operations, with the allocation of costs to the related orders and cost centres.

All of these can be quickly integrated with the company's information system and with leading tools such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Trello, Notion and Jira, and advanced technologies like Sentiment Analysis, Speech-to-text and Deep learning.

Real independent blocks with their own defined roadmap that, cooperating, create a new, fluid and inclusive experience.

How can companies rely on technology partners, such as ITER IDEA, to accelerate automation and develop, deploy and integrate next-generation business applications?

In his article on composable businesses, Vala Afshar (Chief Digital Evangelist in Salesforce) identifies the partnership with AWS (Amazon Web Services) as a determining factor for business developments in line with the objectives of modularity.

As a matter of fact, tight collaboration with cloud professionals is often the major booster for achieving such strategic and decisive advances. And, as we always remark, it's a revolution accessible to businesses of any nature and size.

Continuing with Salesforce's case study, the power of composability is not just about reusing blocks and integrating microservices but also innovating without the need to manage underlying architecture updates over time – a typical limiting factor for future innovations.

This logic is indeed familiar to us and the serverless technologies employed to design our solutions.

The final contribution is by Gregor Hohpe (Enterprise Strategist AWS). In his recent speech, "Building modern cloud applications? Think integration", he underlines how serverless services crucially support the scalability of solutions, thanks to how these services communicate with each other. All this results from over 40 years of innovation in system integration and advancements in coupling mechanisms, i.e. the measure of the interdependence between two or more systems in coordination with each other.

Serverless is more than just a different way to run your cloud workloads. The benefits of these paradigms are much more decisive, and concern how services:

• are designed to ensure security,
• communicate with each other,
• are kept programmatically updated,
• store and access information,
• and so on.

We believe this shared definition of services integration is essential to designing next-generation enterprise applications. Are you with us?

building serverless solutions is an enabling factor for new business models, leading to unique opportunities for any entity — no matter the size or the market.

The well-known benefits come mainly in the form of efficiency, performance, scalability, and security. Nonetheless, another critical factor often undervalued but highly impacted by a serverless approach to designing software is indeed sustainability.

The United Nations defined sustainable development as "meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" (Wikipedia).

Doing our part, we have been working with sustainable technologies and solutions for six years, aligning our efforts to the assertive challenge of the Paris Agreement to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.

In this article, we would like to deepen the role that technology partners play in designing their solutions and the significance of the path on which they lead their customers.

How to achieve the sustainability goals in the cloud?

Sustainability is generally included as a non-functional factor for Solution Architects and technology enablers who, like ITER IDEA, design cloud applications for a large number of users in multiple industrial sectors. A driver that defines, for example:

• how a process is digitalised,
• the type and nature of the data exchanged in interconnected systems,
• the retention policies of documents and archives,
• the frequency and manner in which the data is read,
• the geographical localisation of the contents (to reduce latency),
• the choice of algorithms and infrastructures for a more efficient computational effort,
• and much more.

These sustainability goals also affect how manufacturers produce and constantly update processors and other hardware, aiming for higher capabilities and lower energy consumption.

However, despite these positive and undoubtedly needed efforts,

"The greenest energy is the energy we don’t use" Peter DeSantis, VP of AWS Global Infrastructure.

That is why, with their auto-scaling paradigms and advanced architectures — that avoid over-provisioning while preserving efficiency — serverless solutions generally offer the most benefits in terms of sustainability.

The graph compares the serverless strategy versus traditional on-premise workloads and cloud architectures based on classic instances. In green, the impact of oversized and unused resources, a value directly proportional to the CO2 emissions produced by the services provided.

The graph highlights another fundamental aspect, namely how, starting today,

the migration of on-premise workloads to the cloud will be increasingly crucial for achieving sustainability goals.

A recent report states that "moving on-premises workloads to AWS can lower the workload carbon footprint by 88%". Here's some of the reasons behind this evident advantage:

• a continuous optimisation of the hardware, specifically designed for each type of workload;
• a constant improvement of algorithms in managed services;
• virtualised resources shared over a large number of workloads;
• data centres built with high-efficiency standards (cooling, design, etc.);
• energy mainly supplied from renewable sources;
• etc.

The value of sustainability: a common interest

Kelly Morgan, Research Director, Datacenter Infrastructure & Managed Services, in her “Saving Energy in Europe by Using Amazon Web Services” reports:

More organisations are increasing their focus on the impact they have on the environment. [...] up from 50% in 2017.

In fact, proactivity on sustainability issues, together with the other ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) factors, contributes to improving the reputation of a brand and strengthens the relationship with collaborators – who are statistically more motivated to work with sensitive companies (by over 86% (Pwc, Customer Intelligence Series).

Besides, European government institutions can reward particularly virtuous companies with significant tax relief.

How can environmental sustainability be measured?

Carbon Footprint is a parameter used to estimate the greenhouse gas emissions by a company for producing goods or provisioning services.

Monitoring (and demonstrating) the carbon footprint reduction is increasingly strategic and distinctive for any enterprise, regardless of size or nature.

For this reason, counting on experts in the cloud scenario becomes key to evolving IT solutions and processes in a sustainable manner. Can you count on us? Of course, we are always there for you and our planet!

The pursuit of continuous improvement is part of the Agile philosophy that in ITER IDEA we concretely embrace to ensure profitable growth, as a group and as individuals, professionally and personally. Before this, however, the consolidation of a civil environment (vs hostile environment) is a fundamental step. A civil environment is intended as a collaborative ecosystem characterized by serene and transparent communication, respect between open-minded individuals, a problem-solving mentality (vs "pointing fingers"), productive discussions, etc.

We had the pleasure of discussing these dynamics of interaction and teamwork a few days ago with a group of coordinators and leaders in the association scenario, in collaboration with Erasmus Student Network Italia.

In a speech part of an exciting webinar, I had the pleasure of illustrating

the values of ITER IDEA as a guiding element towards a civil and productive environment.

We focused on the importance of aligning and sharing objectives, roles and tasks, on the culture of accountability, on techniques to give and receive feedback effectively, on inclusiveness and open-mindedness, on retrospective and improvement paths. While analyzing our six values, we have highlighted how each of them leads us every day in effectively interpreting the different aspects of a transparent and productive collaborative climate, intending to make them the backbone of a healthy corporate culture.

The session was stimulating and interactive. We were honoured to bring some of our experience in Agile methodologies and team management to young students and workers eager to move their first steps towards an undoubtedly promising career.

We thank ESN Italia and their Skills and Employability team for the invitation and the general support that the association has provided us for our latest European project: Wonder Wanderlust Women.

This fruitful synergy with international nuances will allow us to take a new step towards the future of studies in Europe: IUAV officially becomes part of Wonder Wanderlust Women partners network, enriching our app in support of female mobility with valuable data.
In all of its uniqueness, Venice is the perfect destination for architecture&design students since IUAV is the only institute in Italy to offer comprehensive training at 360 degrees in architecture, design, planning and urbanism, in the visual and performing arts.

A great opportunity also for Wonder Wanderlust Women, winner at EU Datathon 2021 for the category “An economy that works for people” and of the Public Choice Award as the top-rated app.

The partnership with WWW allows a direct channel with the scholarships and accommodation solutions provided by the university to support our young female users (on average 20-35 years).

University Iuav of Venice

Among the most recognized university institutions in our beautiful country, IUAV is the only one in Italy to offer comprehensive training in architecture, design, planning, and urban planning, in the visual and performing arts.

From its origins, which date back to 1926, the university has always followed an innovative approach in the teaching method, favoring an international environment open to exchanges and contacts with other institutions.

The propensity for innovation is certified by the University's adhesion to the European project, also opening up the possibility of subsequent developments in collaboration with undergraduates, in order to improve the experience of future students.

Are you curious to find out more?

No registration needed: by providing some simple information (such as the age, field of study, spoken languages and so on), we will customize the opportunities map with the most affine cities and destinations. Furthermore, the platform is built to be as inclusive as possible, with accessibility information available for users who desire it.

We believe that this coverage will facilitate the resumption of mobility, fighting the general fear in the future by using relevant European open data and other information by our partners, such as IUAV, who'd like to contribute to shaping a brand new all-female reality.

Would you like to receive further information on the Iuav and its opportunities? Do not hesitate to contact us, Venice could be your next ideal destination!

Where our project fits in the challenge

The Italian team of Dott needed to streamline its operations through a new digital platform for more efficient management and distribution of promotional codes to partners and supporters.

Among them, Italian universities, companies, organisations and municipalities, which become part of this sustainability network that promotes the adoption of electric scooters in their centres.

In numbers,

tens of thousands of promotional tickets will be loaded and redeemed daily through the new platform from all over Italy

to unlock races in Dott's official application.

Working with an international partner requires specific certifications, high levels of service and infrastructural reliability, a scalable geographical distribution and low latency times, as well as an optimized mobile experience for hundreds of thousands of users on mobile and desktop devices.

Security is the top priority for cloud architectures

For this reason, the platform is equipped with tools to protect public endpoints against DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, physical and geographical security measures for stored data, and data residency processes in compliance with the GDPR regulations.

All of these configurations, certifications and tools crucially highlight the importance for modern applications to

adopt the best cloud services on the market, with the benefit of counting on teams of professionals available at any time.

In addition to the technological challenges, for each MVP (Minimum Viable Product), the time factor is always a driver to monitor. Agile methodologies, such as the Scrum framework, represent, in our opinion, the best strategy to obtain results while respecting project times. A series of Sprints and inspect and adapt cycles, characterized by the constant support of the project representatives: this was the winning recipe in our collaboration with Dr. Andrea Giaretta, Vittorio Gattari and the international legal team of Dott.

This pattern allowed us to quickly distribute the platform in Dott's Regional Managers network for the imminent new launches in other Italian municipalities.

The first feedback collected by the team is encouraging. The result convinced our stakeholders in terms of both usability and design. It's the beginning of an exciting collaboration with a high social impact, from which we expect meaningful results.

How will we move in the future? For this and other questions, we are always motivated to receive feedback!

The new B2B platform, just like the most famous construction bricks in the world, is an architecture of several components that, combined together with competence, can create solutions of excellent quality and high added value.

The service synchronizes the information collected by the sorting management system with the ERPs of the resellers, becoming the point of contact between heterogeneous systems.

The interconnected ecosystem of services, explained

Through the new B2B portal, the points of sale compile their assortment orders using the preferred iOS, Android or desktop device, browsing between the items categories and peeking at the next arrivals.

The order requests are then synchronized with the central Zucchetti ERP system to be confirmed and transmitted as picking lists to the logistics departments. Here, warehouse workers use another app, Luigi, on their Zebra devices. From there, they scan references, prepare packages, provide information on the packing lists and take photos of the packaging to certify the status of shipments.

At the end of this wholly digitalized process, the packing lists are integrated into the documentation of the orders. Finally, these documents are published on a service that intelligently notifies end-users about the status of their supplies and shipments, reducing the amount of work of customer-care departments — compared with traditional procedures.

Through on-demand resources, we automatically optimize the architecture following the workload, reducing management costs and increasing the entire ecosystem's efficiency and maintainability.

Omnichannel, "phygital", digitization and sustainability of B2B and B2C systems represent factors of great interest. Relying on industry-leading services, such as Amazon Web Services, allow technology enablers, such as ITER IDEA, to propose advanced solutions designed in a customer-oriented approach and supported by case histories of tens of thousands of customers worldwide.

Let us help you in enhancing your customer-oriented processes!

Lots of data from European sources and a network of interconnected services mix in synergy to support our target users:

the young women who wish to discover opportunities to take new steps towards a general recovery scenario.

More than 3 million records were already automatically analysed to extract the essential information for the people that will experience the Europe of the future.

All this, and much more, will be presented online during the European Open Days (November 25th, Luxembourg).

While pertinent data and an interactive map are essential to our goal, we aim to offer more: we started a virtual tour to discover the most remarkable European services, partners and Ambassador programs aligned with our mission.

Inspiring companies, associations with similar ideals, and other startups are listening to our proposal, combining their visions and feedback in a shared goal that can extend our reciprocal reach.

One of the many lessons that this journey alreadt taught us is the importance of proposing projects that can inspire collaborators and stakeholders: new motivations that incentivize individuals and organizations to act for a purpose. On these topics, we had inspirational conversations with a few editors from newspapers, blogs and websites. We are grateful for the space they dedicated to our project, and we hope we can make even more noise supporting WWW's mission in the weeks ahead!

We hope you find the topics covered exciting, and as always, we will gladly listen to your feedback or, why not, proposals for collaboration!

Some time ago, we came across a new European opportunity that aims to promote valuable initiatives worldwide. The intent? Exploit the enormous potential of open data made available by the European Union to design and implement solutions to support the international community.

The contest consists of a genuine competition that, over the years, has exalted talented teams and their ideas. The participants are inspired by contemporary topics: from youth unemployment to integration, from the circular economy to technology and smart cities.

Since our very first international project, Papaya, data and Europe have always been a combination that ignites our desire to act!

Hence, we started studying how we could mix our technology and expertise with open data to make a positive difference in the current worldwide scenario – knowing well how the pandemic highlighted many penalizing situations across different fields, areas and categories of people. We ourselves, through Papaya, have observed a drastic reduction in the number of international exchanges.

Again, data and Europe can play a decisive role in responding to the needs of an increasing number of users in the restart scenario towards which we are directing.

Our idea was ignited by two main engines: the desire to promote mobility and the will to support the search for new life-changing opportunities, especially where they are needed the most.

Following these motivations, we started outlining the distinctive features and look & feel of the future platform, trying to sum up our intentions in the competition's application procedure.

After a few weeks of waiting, here are the results we were waiting for.

We can't find the words to express our emotions. Still, you can guess how proud we are to see our proposal selected among the 96 overall initiatives from 33 countries, as reported in detail on the official website.

We at ITER IDEA are eager to start implementing the platform and share our thoughts and passion over the topics covered by the project. Further, we are optimistic about the effect it could have on many people in Europe and beyond, and we will work hard to make it happen.

Follow us for some updates and more details on our new European journey, in the name of the opportunities and technology we love so much. In the meantime, you know you can always share some feedback or new ideas with us: let's innovate together!

For instance, it would not be possible to measure production KPIs, precisely calculate the cost of a prototype, digitalise the back office's work and quantify the impact of the expenses of after-sales and support activities.

On the contrary, having an optimized suite to manage mobile reporting allows you to respond immediately and effectively to questions such as: How much did a specific order cost? How much has the impact of post-sales activities been on this prototype? How much are the production times in line with the budget?

Our mobile reporting cloud platform has already digitalised tens of thousands of reports, and it is periodically enriched with new integration capabilities to ensure a connected and increasingly inclusive experience.

We at ITER IDEA are the first consumers of these services: we meticulously monitor the times and activities carried out on our projects. We are so convinced of its potential to continuously invest in the platform's development to enhance it and make it available to an ever wider target.

Through our technology, we let the users choose their favourite devices, from personal smartphone to business tablet, to Windows PC or Mac, always guaranteeing the best possible experience, regardless of the nature of their work.

We studied new ways to facilitating users on the move: speech-to-text for advanced dictation, offline support with signatures collection, automatic translation through artificial intelligence (for activities abroad) and powerful knowledge bases.

Results have been so far convincing. The apps are daily used by over a thousand professionals who can get the most out of a performing platform, increasingly complete and able to benefit from shared experiences from other areas.

The reporting is solid, detailed with shared resources and synchronised with the corporate information ecosystem and other solutions already in use, including ERPs and other management software.

Key word: "Interconnected"

The integration with top-rated services allows our mobile reporting platform to lower the barrier to adoption for new users, who can choose their favorite services to connect with; a few examples?

You can sync appointments with calendaring services such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook, tasks and activities with leading Project Management software such as Atlassian Jira, Trello and Notion, attendance and expense reimbursement with Zucchetti's HR solutions such as HR Infinity and People Smart.

There is no shortage of integration capabilities with business intelligence services. One of them is Amazon QuickSight, a powerful tool that allows you to create dashboards and enhance them with the best Amazon Web Services' machine learning algorithms.

All of this is natively available within the apps that the team uses daily, leading to a significant reduction in training times, external consultancy and up-front licenses.

It is also possible to share generated documents in reserved areas that can communicate with third-parties DMS (Document Management System) solutions.

Finally, a few statistics from our partners:

We dream of a smart, interconnected and paperless world.

The starting point is clear: every company needs to collect data that can be self-generated by mobile applications or from its management system, its 4.0 machinery, and other connected sources.

However, is this information actually consulted at the right time? For example, is operational data displayed to monitor the status of open orders to avoid delays in deliveries, or is it analyzed only later?

These kinds of questions have led us to work closely with many local realities. As a result, we have ascertained the actual needs: keep the focus on operational data and receive real-time updates during the workflow in different production sectors.

It is no revolution: intranets, physical connections, or screen mirroring can sometimes satisfy the required tasks, but are they the right technologies to achieve full operability in modern times?

• How to access on the go via your smartphone and receive push notifications on important updates?
• How to manage the multiplication of dashboards in various company sectors: do we always have a computer available to use reliably for each workstation?
• How can I ask for more from my dashboards in a sustainable way?

Here is how we imagined the ideal solution

Quick dashboard creation and connection, full customization without any technical intervention, easy access to information: it's as simple as turning the TV on!

You can download the app on your smartphone, access it via a web browser, and even use the application directly on an Android TV — the sign-in doesn't require the use of a keyboard. In addition, you can select the best dashboard for each different device.

Furthermore, thanks to the compatibility with the ChromeOS operating system, it is also possible to use the app on mini-computer devices in totem mode.

Let's not forget about interconnected services

By exploiting the cloud platform and the ITER IDEA ecosystem, all the apps used by the organization can make their data automatically available. In this way, through a few configurations and without access to other systems, you can create dashboards to view information collected — from activity reporting to warehouse picking.

Consequently, it is possible to answer questions such as:

• What are the most used spare parts in maintenance interventions?
• How many orders have been prepared in the last month?
• Which orders are overdue?

and much more, all without developing a specific connector for your management system.

What about more complicated scenarios?

We have mentioned the integration with Amazon QuickSight, which allows you to create complex dashboards that use advanced graphical tools and powerful machine learning algorithms to add predictive features on trends.

Wondering if the technologies and tools adopted are the best to do a job is the starting point for improving it.

For this purpose, we have been supporting partners engaged in mobile data collection in clinics throughout Italy for years. Their goal? Timely and completely paperless transmission of information relating to medical trials to the central organisation for safe archiving and subsequent processing.

Pain therapies and periodic training for the treatment of diabetes are the main fields of application of our solutions, areas in which the precision and clarity of the information provided to patients favour the correct use of the tools and the safety of the patients themselves.

Further, the spread of tools such as the Italian SPID (Public System of Digital Identity) to access Public Administration services represents one of the enabling factors for adopting Digital Health tools.

Scalable and secure cloud architectures combined with a mobile user experience help users of all ages to meet the new technological challenges. From here, thanks to partnerships with professionals and medical clinics, we are developing new apps that facilitate access to verified information from qualified personnel — at the expense of other not-competent channels and social media.

Bring the professionals closer to their patients.

In our mission of bringing professionals closer to their patients, there is no lack of collaborations in telemedicine and IoT (Internet of Things). One of our channels is the network of experts in the AWS Partner Network (APN)  with whom we work together and share projects and needs.

Investigating the role of technology to propose valuable solutions is perhaps our biggest drive. The use of cutting-edge products and services represents one of the means by which we achieve our goals; this is the case of Amazon Comprehend Medical, the artificial intelligence service that can be a powerful ally in revising medical documents. For example, the service can help to process data in real-time to create virtual assistants or chatbots. The results of the predictions help highlight biases, recognise patterns to speed up the clinical plan, and propose new therapies and treatment programs — always under the supervision of medical personnel.

The future of Healthcare is digital, and it is already here.

How so?

Certain technologies allow you to reach a sensitive number of users, who, through their favourite devices, can try and then fall in love with your products, without barriers and in complete transparency.

These advanced architectures have led us to imagine and then introduce services ready to scale, i.e. able to cover the needs of thousands, tens of thousands, and (hopefully soon) hundreds of thousands of users —  in a safe, reliable, and sustainable way.

One of the projects that most represents this philosophy is Papaya, a matching platform that, thanks to its community and the work of the Erasmus Student Network, is now used in almost 100 European universities. In periods of most significant influx, the platform can effectively manage thousands of parallel requests from students from all over Europe.

One of the keys to reaching an international audience is offering multilingual support within our services.

We even created an app for this purpose!

Huh?! is a service to facilitate the collaborative translation of application content, supporting user communities through a mobile experience. The terms to translate in the various languages are highlighted to guide you during the entire process. Finally, you can download the updated version of the translations in multiple formats to be later imported into your app or website.

In addition to digital stores, the global market allows every company and startup to explore new possibilities and propose their ideas to a larger and more varied audience.

Exploration is also the concept behind our latest European challenge: to regain the right to one's mobility and growth experiences via a cloud platform. This is the story of our project "WWW", one of the finalist solutions at EU Datathon 21, for the category "an economy that works for people".

Targeting the global market helps ITER IDEA to maintain high-quality standards for its solutions, allowing business users to interact with connected systems fluidly, as they are used to with the typical apps on their mobile devices.

The network of SMEs is full of excellence and stimulating challenges; modern problems require skills, professionalism, and potential that have to be found within a vast network of collaborations. Moreover, the use of the cloud and best practices in creating products is an increasingly perceived requirement for today's applications: interconnected services that need to stay competitive and future-proof.

The global market requires you to go beyond your frontiers, with the desire to experiment and dream big.

Different areas but shared motivation: take advantage of cloud-based technologies and innovative approaches to create concrete advantages.

Software solutions in the logistics field are certainly not lacking on the market. IT partners frequently create small in-house applications to cover any shortcomings of the ERP systems; alternatively, they rely on widely-used — but sometimes oversized — enterprise solutions. We think, for example, of complete WMS (Warehouse Management System) systems, which often involve significant investments in terms of hardware equipment, network architectures, consultancy and training times.

Indeed, we do not want to question those leading systems and their capabilities. However, after working with many of these platforms, we sought a deliberately different approach. We have asked ourselves: are such investments always necessary for an SMBs? How efficient is the model of in-house software solutions? Is there a faster and more maintainable way to digitalise logistics processes?

A new approach: Agile Warehousing.

We envisioned logistics in which devices and user experiences were at the customer's discretion. A modular platform characterised by a pool of highly specialised functionalities and a framework to guarantee the rapid development of new capabilities. A shared improvement transparently made available to all of our users.

In line with our mobile-first approach, the platform pays maximum attention to the usability and intuitiveness of its interfaces — a non-trivial aspect in WMS systems with many complex features, often used by a target with frequent turnover.

The proposal involved realities in exponential growth, such as the ATK Sports team, among the first to believe in this alternative logistics project, which has enjoyed all the advantages of a low-impact digitalization.

Following the ongoing developments of the platform, the term Agile Warehousing has begun to represent a new way to navigate corporate warehouses virtually. An advantage intended not only for warehouse operators but also for commercial departments, now able to access updated statistics directly from their smartphone.

The possibilities for experimentation and interconnection are many: optimising picking missions through Machine Learning, integrating vertical warehouses, working with voice assistants, interacting with RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) tags, etc.

The logistics platform has API interfaces that enable communication with external services, such as e-commerce, B2B or B2C portals. Through the mobile app, it is possible to transmit push notifications to the variation of orders, allowing the involvement of end customers within the corporate ecosystem.

Join our Agile Warehousing movement!

In the previous months, we focused on improving the service's stability and reactivity – working under the hood. You surely noticed the change: Horace is faster than ever!

With the newest release, we redesigned the Quick Switch feature in the dashboard: now it's easier to recognise users and to hide long lists when needed.

In the dashboard, we also enriched the tracks summary view by adding a preview of their contents, so they are easier to recognise in case you work with similar activities.

In the following weeks, we'll be working on a few Business Intelligence elements to empower the homepage with some general statistics about your activities and their progress... stay tuned!

Enjoy Horace, and if you have fresh ideas to improve the service, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

Following a few silent releases that improved the service's stability and reactivity, here we go with some fresh features for you. Let's take a look!

Starting from the top: we adopted a different approach for the toolbar to display on large screens (tablet and desktop devices); this allowed us to include more information and, in the future, more actions to run right from there.

On the side of the agenda, you now find the extended list of your teammates, with some handy checkboxes to quickly filter the activities. Fewer taps, more productivity!

Right below the toolbar, the Activities recap widget has a new button: by tapping it, you will switch to the team's statics, to have a sneak peek on how your whole team is performing (if you have enough permissions, of course).

Following your precious feedback, we unlocked the power of the calendar view, which can now explore activities and appointments in the past: Great Scott!

Finally, to be more inclusive towards specific kind of companies – and the current worldwide scenario – we added a team configuration to allow remote activities, i.e. activities which aren't executed at the customer's destinations, but rather from the office or home. This kind of activities will be marked differently in the user interface so that you can distinguish them from the regular ones.

Keep up the great work, and if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

When we first designed the service, we had a specific target device in mind: the Chromebit. This tiny computer (running ChromeOS) can be plugged via HDMI to any monitor or television, enabling Max to come to life. In fact, it’s on this kind of big displays that our service gives its best in different scenarios: warehouses (production lists, orders lists), offices (task lists, tickets), etc.

Unfortunately, Google recently declared the end of the support for the device, forcing us to rethink some parts of the service, as well as the distributor (previously, the Chrome Web Store). Considering the rising of Android TV devices, the choice was straightforward; there are many compatible TVs right out of the factory, and you always have the option of a cheap “HDMI stick” (similarly to the Chromebit) running this particular customisation of Android.

While we re-engineered some of Max’s functionalities to work with Android TV and its characteristic D-pad remote control, we took the chance to try an interesting technology offered (since early 2019) by the Amazon Web Services:

web socket APIs.

Compared to regular HTTP requests, socket connections (and consequent requests) are much more suitable to the use case of Max: a continuous exchange of information to always have the latest data available to display, live. Other examples of application using socket-like connections are chats, collaborative editing apps (e.g. Google Docs), online games, etc.

With the new model, when a piece of data is generated on the ERP (or other software) and pushed to Max's cloud, the generated information is automatically distributed, live, to any device running the app, through a secure socket connection.

Thanks to the renewed architecture, we were able to create a simplified version of the sign-in flow in Max. Similarly to what happens with other TV apps (e.g. Netflix, Disney+, etc.), it's now possible to securely login through a special code displayed on the TV running Max, avoiding the insertion of (hopefully) long passwords through the TV remote.

Of course, this upgrade doesn't affect the usual service capabilities in terms of User Interface customisation; colours, icons, positions, sizes, borders, avatars, logos, etc.: you can still define every aspect of your data is displayed.

Finally, although it gives its best on large screens, the app keeps working fine on a wide lineup of devices, regardless of the screen size:

Max is always ready to display your important information, anywhere!

Curious enough to know more? Contact us!

Any tool you use, no matter how advanced and useful, always has that little something that you don't entirely like or that you wish to change somehow. When we work on improving Scarlett, we try to reduce that "something" to the tiniest portion we can, continuously adding easy-to-use configurations and smart functionalities.

This time, we focused our customisation efforts on a critical part of your work: the PDF report that recaps the content of your activity. It's the document that you give or send to your customers, so it has to be simple, clear, and – why not – nice to see!

Starting from this release,

you can fully personalise the PDF template of each model you create.

In the Model page, you can interact with a new section: PDF report.

You can change the logo, the header and footer information, the colours and, of course, the template of the PDF. The new template builder, accessible from the PDF template option, it's straightforward: you can take advantage of sections and fields to design how the final PDF report will look like. For example, look below how the template in the model configuration resembles the areas of its PDF report.

By taking advantage of many sections (customer's data, report detail, users detail, items used, etc.), you can go deep in your customisation, and decide which fields to show for each row and how much space they should occupy. You can see an example of the Items used inner section (and how the final result looks) here below.

You can add page breaks, blank row for spacing, headers... the look of your PDF reports is entirely up to you! Of course, if you don't feel much of an artist, you can still keep the default template.

Another cool feature of this new version of Scarlett allows you to define custom checkboxes to make available when using items in an activity. Common scenarios are: items that you rent, items that you give based on a warranty, etc. As always, you decide!

Finally, of course, we made sure to keep the user experience of Scarlett great, solving some minor issues and adding a few improvements here and there for you.

Enjoy customising your reports! If you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

Starting with this release, Arthur opens up to a series of steps that will renew the world of relationships within the platform, focusing on a new essential entity: People.

People represent a new gateway to information as well as the junction point between the subjects and the registered activities.

All those situations in which transmitting knowledge or recovering pieces of information exchanged with a particular contact can really make a difference.

And it is only the beginning; through the interconnections between people and other entities, Arthur will open to a new way to navigate information, and the team can access a new knowledge base made of notes, ideas and insights previously hidden away and not shared.

Arthur has a clear vision on what's ahead: just be sure to follow the next updates!

Here's some other interesting improvement included in the releae:

• Automatic relationships between people and subjects. 🔗
• Another new entity: Contacts. 👥
• You can insert an activity starting from a Contact. 🕴
• A few bug-fixes and other improvements. 🐜

If you have new ideas for improving the service or something to report to us, we will be happy to have your feedback! 🙌

Considering the hard times we are living in, it may result difficult to keep a continuous clear vision of what's ahead, both in life and business. Scarlett aims to support teams in their daily activities so that they can focus on their next steps and their growth. Many of Scarlett's features are, in fact, built to ease and fasten your most tedious tasks, to provide better outcomes with smaller efforts – to your and your team's benefit. Today, we add another piece in your productivity's puzzle, to help you manage, beyond your daily operations, what lies ahead in your next future.

Since the previous release, you can take advantage of a bewitching calendar-view, to easily understand the distribution of your workload for the next weeks. On top of that, we built another key feature: you can now link external calendars,

from top calendar services like Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook,

letting all of your appointments flow into Scarlett and become part of your scheduling routines: how amazing is that?

To link a calendar in a certain team, you can open your profile page from the menu (tap your name or your avatar) and access the new section "External calendar". From there, it's a piece of cake to complete the connection: sign-into your favourite service with the account containing the calendar you wish to use, then select it from the list that appears. Smooth!

You can go back to the dashboard and see your appointments mixing with the activities you already planned: nothing will be out of your sight anymore! Remember: you can always switch from the list-view to the calendar-view by tapping the namesake buttons. From now on, when you select an appointment coming from your favourite external calendar, you can decide if you want to schedule an activity or if you prefer to start a new report right away. In both cases, Scarlett will analyse the information from the appointment, mapping all the data into your new activity or report. And it goes beyond that: it will suggest you the customers that are more likely to be your targets, based on title, description and location of your appointment.

Of course, you can also go the other way around. After you connected a calendar, you can schedule a new activity and let Scarlett create a fresh linked appointment for you: the latter will appear in your external calendar in no time.

Once you linked an appointment with an activity (if the calendar you linked owns the appointment), each change to the activity will be synchronised with the appointment automatically. Similarly, if anyone makes a change into the appointment, you will be notified in Scarlett, so that you're free to take further actions on it.

The more team members link their own calendars, the more the system will be complete and precise: the users with the right permissions will be able to use this new piece of data to do more reliable planning for the team. Be aware: when you link an external calendar, any team member with permission to see your activities will be able to see your appointments in Scarlett; use a work calendar to be sure to keep your privacy. 🤚

While we are sure you're already trying linking your calendars, we have something else we want to show you! We completely renewed the panel that opens when you want to take an action on an entity in Scarlett; if you open it from a mobile device, you won't notice changes, whereas if you open it on a larger screen, you will now enjoy a richer and clearer action sheet.

Finally, some other improvements included in this new version:

• You can clone a model, to copy its settings into a new one. 👫
• Unassigned activities for which you start a report will be automatically assigned to you. 🎯
• Minor bug-fixes and small improvements. 🌼

Enjoy planning your work! If you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

We believe that teamwork and information sharing are key to a team's success; for this reason, we equipped users with a new way to exchange communications and tasks between team members. Tasks can be personal or may involve multiple users and they are shared through push notifications which are sent directly to the devices concerned.

Tasks represent the ideal tool for rapid communications that require an overview of the progress.

Unlike emails, a task is directly integrated with the ERM system. From the main page, each user has the possibility to check their active tasks and complete or archive communications.

We are sure of it:

you will love your new list and no longer having to search through the endless email inbox.

We also introduced two unique entities: Campaigns and Projects. These are specifically designed to group team activities, for enriching statistics and to extend the research possibilities. In fact, campaigns and projects make it possible to answer questions such as: "Which customers are active on the Arthur 2020 campaign?", "How many activities were carried out on the Logistics project for the customer XYZ?", etc. All of this, by taking advantage of the typical flexibility of Arthur's entities.

But it's not over yet! In this version you will find several other improvements

• Inhibit the manipulation of activities after a certain number of days. 🔏
• Customise group display options on entity tabs. 👁
• Disable a visibility group which is not used anymore. 🚫
• Minor bug fixes and improvements. 🐜

If you have new ideas for improving the service or something to report to us, we will be happy to have your feedback! 🙌

Mario, our app whose mission is to optimize picking activities, was highlighted in the recent past for its support to ATK, which allowed the team to gain preparation times of real gold medal winners.

Today we have the chance to present you the next step our journey: the evolution of Mario into a new super-app, which aims to give you full control on most of the typical tasks you perform in your warehouse. Codename: Luigi!

In addition to managing the flow of outgoing goods handling, the warehouse operator has the ability to perform total or rotary inventories, check the availability of references, consult alternative items for commercial purposes, receive reports from colleagues in the back office, attach photos of the packaging to certify the condition of the goods and much more.

All of this, through a single account on your favourite mobile device, taking advantage in every situation of an optimal, functional and intuitive use.

The user experience represents a real challenge for WMS (Warehouse Management System) solutions which are required to convey a high number of functionalities

in an environment with a high turnover of personnel (such as that of warehouse workers), decreasing the learning curve of the tool represents a strategic factor that cannot be underestimated.

The increase in the competitiveness of our mobile solution is driven by the evolution of the partners with whom we work with on a daily basis, and on their needs.

This is again the case of ATK, which in response to new needs in terms of the reorganization of logistics spaces, has changed its layout by equipping automatic storage systems such as vertical warehouses.

In this logistics ecosystem optimization scenario, we had the opportunity to study the ways in which Luigi can be integrated with the new vertical storage systems, making them cooperate within the picking processes.

Luigi and vertical storage systems: how and when?

The synergy between Luigi and vertical storage systems gives its best when the outgoing goods are not stored entirely inside the movable trays, but rather an external and dynamic preparation area is maintained. In this configuration, the preparation lists are sent simultaneously in the app and in the centralized system.

Operators can check the lists directly on their terminal, where the app will indicate the suggested source for finding each reference, quickly differentiating the codes available externally from those that require to be gathered via the on-board computer.

The requested material is received at the work bay where it can be quickly scanned, activating automatic controls for partial evasions and any programmed automatisms. In the end, the list can be completed in the app, where it is possible to certify the preparation with attachments and photos, to picture the external appearance of the packages and to print the packing list.

By synchronizing the preparations with the ERP system, it is finally possible to generate the shipping documentation and send the new inventory to the central system of the high-bay warehouse, to manage any misalignments.

Do you want to know more about Luigi and its cooperation with storage systems? Contact us!

This evolution has seen many different technologies connected together in creating physical voice assistants, i.e. design tools capable of listening and understanding the user's voice, operating consequently. These unique objects take advantage of cloud computing to carry out a series of actions in the world around us, based on what we say or ask them.

Home automation is just an example of how conversational interfaces and speech recognition techniques operate daily. The application fields are countless: logistic systems controlled by voice, chatbots for customer service, support tools for lifecare, or other solutions to improve our lifestyle, at home and work.

In many cases, analysing the natural language makes technology more accessible. Studies conducted by the Amazon Web Services (AWS) team on Alexa (the voice assistant living inside Amazon's devices) shows how

conversational interfaces are evolving more rapidly than previous comparable technologies, such as input devices, keyboards and touchscreens.

Therefore, it is not surprising that many consider natural language interfaces one of the characterizing aspect of the applications of the next future.

Why Scarlett learnt to listen.

A goal of ours is to bring these wonderful technologies into the daily reality, to solve some of the actual perceived needs of Scarlett's users.

Through our partnership with Daniele from AGIC we had the opportunity to collect his feedback.

“These days, in an increasing number of interventions, we are required to use additional precautions, such as latex gloves during maintenance. Gloves do not allow us to use the touch screen of the tablet, and it becomes impossible to collect notes in real-time. Hence, it happens to lose information and useful details while you document the interventions at their conclusion, especially for those which lasts more days."

This is just one of the cases in which we can apply speech technology to support daily scenarios, moreover since users are now used to audio recording tools and similar features from their favourite messaging apps.

On that account, in a recent update of Scarlett, we enabled a voice interface for listening to the main descriptive fields and report notes, using speech analysis and conversational models, both on iOS and Android.

In only a few weeks of use of the beta version, the functionality helped Daniele and his team to gather a very solid and detailed first draft of their interventions reports. Once the technicians are free from their gloves, they can refine the dictated text, putting it to the customer validation. This way, AGIC reported up to 30% time-saving when creating reports of  multi-days activities.

Of course,

this is just a glimpse on what these technologies can enable in Scarlett.

Our final goal is to design a fully conversational interface, to fill in the reports of your activities without touching the device. This will make the service even more accessible and, therefore, impactful on the companies daily routines.

In the meantime, we are ready to collect feedback and impressions of what we introduced so far, in order to improve the feature. Do you have any? Let us know!

Trick or treat? 🎃 ...  definitely, treat!! 🍬

The latest release of Scarlett comes equipped with a new set of important and work-changing features. Let's go through them!

The dashboard is enriched with an alternative view for the agenda: the calendar! Switch between month, week and day modes to fully enjoy your activities: planning your work won't be the same again!

The calendar view is very flexible: you can adapt it to your unique scenario. Go to the team configuration and decide how things should be.

P.S. wait for it... in the next release, you will be able to link external calendars (from services such as Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook) and see your dashboard really come alive! 👻

If you like planning things, you surely loved what you've just seen; but, sometimes, you only need to quickly insert a new report, without bothering too much on the details. So, the next time you are at the customer's office, and you need to get things done fast, use the new button "Unplanned report" from the dashboard.

Through this new approach, you can avoid to take care of extra information and fill in your report in a few taps.

Then again, if you're really in a rush,

you can tell Scarlett what to write for you.

The improved speech recognition feature will listen for your tales and put everything on "digital paper", taking advantage of the latest speech synthesis algorithms. You can use this feature on mobile devices, over the main description fields of the app!

You just finished tell Scarlett your workday: now you want your customer to receive and enjoy the carefully-crafted report. Of course, you can still send an email with the PDF report and other linked resources attached. However, the customer may prefer having a centralised location to access and consult their latest documents. To satisfy this scenario, we developed a new functionality: Portal.

If you enable it from the team configurations, you will be able to select customers and contacts allowed to access their Portal (with their own unique credentials). When you do that, after the completion of an activity, the customers will receive a notification that

a new document has been added to the Portal.

And that's not it! From our experience, the problem with Portals is that customers often forget their passwords, forcing you to generate new credentials every other day. To solve this situation, we made sure the notification includes a magic link through which they can access the portal without credentials, for a limited amount of time. Out of this world! 🪐

The candies aren't finished! When you're about to start a new report, it's surely useful to know what has been done lately over the targeted customer: the new widget is alive! 🧟‍♂️

Your bag is quite full now... but, there's still some treat:

• A quicker start-up. 🏃‍♂️
• You can insert all-day-long activities. ☀️
• Choose beautiful colours for your models through a new picker. 🎨
• The pickers to select your entities now include more information. 🕵️‍♀️
• Many new configurations for team and models, to customise your experience in Scarlett even further. 🧩
• Avoided using geolocation when not necessary. 🌱
• Minor bug-fixes. 🐾

Enjoy (a scarily good) Scarlett! 🎃 And, if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

The starting point for significant synergies is always shared ideals. The great technical skills and the constant desire to innovate become the mantras of ITER IDEA and Vezzadini: the latter, a proudly Italian reality, has been a leading company for over 60 years in the field of packaging butter, margarine, goat cheese and robiola.

The collaboration with the Vezzadini family and Monica Annigoni, administrative chief, becomes for us a concrete testimony of how to bet on sustainability and environment —  thematics particularly close to Scarlett and her green campaigns — leads to an increase in competitiveness and quality of work.

The inventiveness and imagination of Vezzadini, Italian peculiarities, have been able to highlight the company on the global market, where the reliability and versatility of technically advanced products have made the most of the brand.

The constant research for optimization of the company's equipment has led Vezzadini to meet Scarlett; the technicians' squad uses the service to report their activities, regardless if they are working in Italy or abroad; apart from instant benefits on the team of professionals, Scarlett also improved many of the linked business dynamics.

Some direct advantages have been the digitalisation of customized models, and the ability to plan and schedule the work while supporting and supervising the team. Consequently, removing the superfluous use of paper copies of the interventions led Vezzadini to a significant reduction in its environmental impact.

The time-saving benefit is another crucial factor in Vezzadini's satisfaction: internal notes, technical details of the interventions, and the instant sharing of reports have become a relief for the bureaucracy of the company.

As Monica revealed to us, the technicians often need to carry out very long trips abroad, up to 20 or 30 days. Once, it was necessary to wait for paper reports when the technicians returned; today, thanks to Scarlett, the reports are instantly available. This significant improvement also relieves the administration of a substantial amount of work, saving the usual rush to meet monthly deadlines. In qualitative terms, the job's tasklist has clearly improved.

The enhancement does not stop there: the team is ready to raise the level of service offered to its international partners and the quality of the work of users abroad. The new Scarlett AI Translate functionality will allow for precise and enriched translations through specialized technical dictionaries, available in over 50 languages; all this by exploiting the tremendous opportunities offered by the cloud, by the most powerful artificial intelligence and deep learning algorithms. Customers abroad will be able to enjoy an innovative experience, certifying the interventions of the technicians now available and understandable in their preferred language.

Stay tuned to find out how Scarlett can improve your work and that of your team. Join the many professionals, such as Vezzadini's team, who use Scarlett every day to digitize their work.

Feedback is king! When we develop new features, we try to quickly draft a User Experience so that the opinion of our stakeholders can lead our way.

This time, we needed to create a new picker which would have allowed technicians and other professionals to fill out in a jiffy the time worked on a certain day. In our opinion, the standard components offered by the operative systems of smartphones, tablets, computers, etc. weren't effective enough.

Therefore, we started crafting something new.

After a few cycles of feedback and improvements, we finalised the feature: welcome the new time interval picker!

The same feedback logic strengthened one of the features we rolled out recently: multi-day activities. Our users loved the functionality, but they sometimes found it difficult to distinguish the data related to a particular day of the report. Taking into account detailed suggestions, we redesigned the component, which now looks much more clear and effective.

Hence, thank you all for helping us build a better Scarlett!

P.S. in this version, we also made sure to remove some tedious bugs, and we introduced many minor improvements: Scarlett has never been so fluid!

Enjoy Scarlett! And, if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

How important is it not to lose information? To take the right action at the right time? To be coordinated with your team? Arthur knows this well; that's why the service constantly evolves, giving you tools to monitor your daily activities and your teamwork.

Today, the consolidated follow-up functionality, which allows Arthur users to set up reminders for their daily visits and activities, is enriched with important new features. In addition to the usual email communication, you can receive follow-up actions via push notifications on your mobile devices, natively on either iOS or Android.

Staying on track without missing any opportunities has never been so easy!

Of course, we do not stop here, below the other news of the latest update:

• Significant improvements to the Agenda module and its integration with external services such as Google Calendars and Microsoft Outlook. 📆
• Easily access the latest recorded activities on your products; you will never lose sight of an offer again! 🔖
• Set up your team with all the flexibility you need. To quickly start connecting the dots! 🎢
• Various bug-fixes and minor improvements. 🐜

If you have new ideas for improving the service or something to report to us, we will be happy to have your feedback! 🙌

Scarlett's purpose is to always be by your side, supporting your daily activities and your team's goals. For this reason, we design each new functionality in a way that can ease your work, saving you time and stress.

In the latest release, we added an intuitive navigation tree at the side of the Activities interface, so you can quickly jump between the sections you configured and have an overview of the contents of your reports.

When you start using Scarlett for the first time, you will see some demo entities that we prepared to guide you in the first steps. But, of course, Scarlett won't be truly yours until all of your data is there. Therefore, we crafted two new wizard procedures: Import and Export; you can find them in the main menu.

In the menu, you will also find a new Resource Center option: upload and manage manuals, documents and pictures from your devices and make them available to the whole team.

Make sure you're using the latest version of Scarlett to access the above-mentioned features and also:

• You can subscribe to one of our plans and get the most out of your experience in Scarlett! 💎
• If an activity is using an old model, you can update it automatically to the latest version. 📬
• The suggested follow-up notification now clearly states the target. 🎯
• You can now set default values in custom fields of type "Choice". 🥚
• Minor bug-fixes and improvements. 🕷

Enjoy Scarlett! And, if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

The way you work determines your team's productivity. There are many approaches to getting things done, but we are all looking for the quickest and more efficient so that we can better focus on reaching our goals. Following this state of mind, we added a new workflow logic to Scarlett, that aims to help you keeping control over your team's activities.

Future activities are always shown in the agenda, so you know when/what is coming next. Past activities, though, could be a little trickier to monitor, and it's easy to forget some crucial steps while focusing on our daily routines. Take advantage of the widget on the homepage (and in the archive) to know what you have to do to for each unfinished activity, so you can quickly get it done!

By tapping over a specific state of the workflow, you will navigate to the detailed list of contained activities. That simple! You can also configure the workflow (team's page) to tailor it to your needs.

Furthermore, we analysed how users create their activities, and we realised sometimes it's useful to be able to insert new entities (such as customers, destinations and contacts) when creating an activity. In this way, if you need to refer to a customer that doesn't exist yet in your database, you don't have to navigate to other pages to add it, keeping your flow smooth and fast.

In the same way, when a customer is created, we now propose you to automatically add its first destination, saving other precious seconds.

Next, it can happen you don't remember exactly where a customer of yours is. To give you a visual glimpse, we added some useful map widgets (powered by Google Maps), so you always know where you need to go next or where are your customers and their offices.

Since Scarlett's audience is growing, we also refreshed the introductive page of the service, which is beautiful as never before! Take a look to know more about Scarlett and what it can do for your business.

Finally, all the other features we crafted for you in this release:

• We added a demo environment for newcomers! 🆕
• We improved the PDF reports. 📃
• We improved the help messages of every page. 💬
• New options in models and team configuration. 🎛
• Minor bug-fixes. 🐜

Enjoy Scarlett! And, if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

Looking for hidden clues in your customers' geographic locations? You're somewhere out there, and you want a tip where to go next? Let Arthur guide you through its new subjects maps!

All your subjects will be now clustered together based on their geographic location (automatically calculated by their addresses) so that you can explore a map by zooming in/out and moving around.

In the same image above, you can also notice the new mini-sidebar on the left: if you prefer it over the standard side-menu, you can enable it with the toggle button on the bottom.

Of course, with the usual seamless experience, you can take advantage of the new map also on mobile devices.

Finally, take a look at the other little treats we added to this new version:

• Default filters for showing only your contents (dashboard and activities). 🎯
• A stunning dark mode and a generally-improved UI. 🌑
• Various bug-fixes and minor improvements. 🐛

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

If you offer your services throughout the world or in a wide area of your country, it can happen you have to deal with activities on a customer's site lasting for days. To support this scenario, we added a new option in the team configurations page, that enables the insertion of daily reports for your activities.

Inside your activities, you will be able to navigate through the days, to prepare a more detailed report without the need for multiple signatures or extra efforts. Intuitive and effective!

We designed Scarlett to be flexible and customisable so that it can adapt to any scenario in which you need to fill out reports for your activities: anyone could potentially use the service. Therefore, we dedicated time to create a comprehensive user experience that can guide you with accessible and straightforward descriptions.

By the way, you may have noticed the new stunning Dark Mode! Note: your device's preferences regulate the switch between Light and Dark mode.

We also realised that big teams might need more control over their users' permissions. That's why we created a new page to allow a fine-grained configuration for accessing your team's resources: administrators can now easily allow or block specific features for each user.

We also fixed several minor bugs and gave a speed-boost to long lists, which take advantage of an ingenious cache mechanism to load faster.

Go on and update Scarlett to the latest version! And, if you have any feedback or ideas, we are glad to hear them! 🙌

As we write, the cloud service we created to support exchange students at the beginning of their experience abroad reached its fourth version. The platform maintained together with the volunteers of Erasmus Student Network (ESN) Modena, offers now its projects to more than 80 Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across 20 countries in Europe (and beyond), with an audience of almost 10,000 new users each year.

This diverse set of users composed of students, trainees and workers from all over the world, gave us the chance to study and improve the numeric and geographic scalability of our cloud infrastructures. With devices of any kind connecting to Papaya through its apps or any browser, we also had the chance to fine-tune the User Experience of our interfaces, independently of the screen resolution.

By analysing this interesting piece of data, we confirmed what we already knew; the service is mostly used when a new academic semester is on sight: at the beginning of the year and during summer. At this time, exchange students/workers need to prepare for their abroad experience, and so they count on Papaya and its welcoming projects to ease their worries.

Of course, when the incoming students start to feel at home in their new countries, they need welcoming services — as Papaya was designed to be — less and less. But, at the same time, we were sure that users still like to be aided to meet new people and feel welcomed along the rest of their time abroad: we were only missing the right projects in Papaya. Hence, since we can count on an active community (who helps the exchange people to be matched with local/international students),

we developed the idea of letting ESN sections and HEIs to create their own projects,

based on their specific needs.

Clearly, there is a lot of complexity hidden in Papaya's algorithms, so we had to find a way to make these projects easy to create and maintain. After a few months of designing, we finally gave birth to the fourth version of the cloud service, which now allows a fine-tune configuration on each of the projects, to suists any need.

When we create a new project – from scratch or using one of the templates from the Gallery, we can now edit all the related information. Since we are in such an international environment, Papaya supports full multilingual capabilities.

When we consider configurations, we are not only talking about the decorative details: we can decide which fields to add for each project and how they should work in it.

Then,

we masked the complexity of the affinity algorithms through an intuitive set of sliders;

anyone can now quickly configure what is more important to consider when matching users for a particular project: just slide the pins left or right!

By putting together an easy-to-use infrastructure and the creativity of the Papaya's community, we believe we can enhance once more our help towards the international students/workers who go abroad and need help to get accustomed to the new country.

Let's see how the next months will turn out! Till then, keep having good ideas! 💡

To take the best out of your activities in Scarlett, you can link together different entities: customers, destinations, contacts, items, projects, etc. They are all essential and they give their best when connected. If you agree with us, you will love the new interfaces we designed! You can now easily add and manage your entities and their details, directly in Scarlett. Access them from the menu, even offline (configure your team to do so)!

A comprehensive list of configurations is at your disposal on the team page, where you can set the company's details, your internalisation preferences and other options to shape the experience for your teammates in Scarlett. You can also create as many models as you need, and customize them to the tiniest detail.

So cool, right!? But wait, we have still so much more for you:

• A renewed user interface 🌷
• A faster and better offline experience 🏕
• URLs which starts with https://scarlett.iter-idea.com will now open in the app 🔗
• Choose the signatory from your contacts 🖌
• A more powerful search of activities in the archive 🔎
• A better email composer and configurator 📧
• Improved the integration with Horace ⏱
• Several bug-fixes and minor improvements 🐞

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

Designing cool cloud services, it's not only our job: it's our passion. Sometimes, during weekends we like to experiment with something new and challenge our skills. A few weeks ago, we decided to have a one-day programming marathon to improve one of our processes. Wait; let's take a step back.

Our services born multilingual: we cherish the idea of having our products available to anyone in the world who needs some good piece of technology to improve their daily work. Therefore, we always release our projects with at least two languages available: Italian, our mother tongue, and English. Some projects have even up to five languages: Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and German; this is the case of Papaya.

No, we are not as polyglot as Scarlett,

but – luckily – we have many friends and colleagues around the world willing to help us in our mission of sparking innovation to the many companies who dream big.

In this process of remote aided-translation, we usually had to exchange several files containing the different sentences and words used in our products. It was neither handy nor user-friendly. Of course, there are platforms out there that offer support towards this objectives, but we didn't find any affordable solution which suited our interests (and our liking).

Flash-forward: we decided to build our own during a Saturday.

It was a beautiful and challenging day/night of work which originated... Huh!? – the translation tool.

The features are basic: we can create new projects, set up new languages, load the sentences in the original language and give different users the possibility to add and review the missing translation. All of this in a process that highlights what changed from version to version and how much work is left.

It is not, obviously, a product ready to be put on the market. Still, we like the idea of having crafted the source code, the icon, the responsive user interface and its highly scalable and cheap cloud structure in this one-day-programming marathon: basically, the whole package.

In the last weeks, we had the chance to use it in our daily work, and we are indeed satisfied with the experience. Who knows, maybe one day Huh!? will become something more than a side-project. Till then...

...it was fun! 💡

The phenomenon of Smart Working is spreading in what is presented as a reference working framework. "Intelligent work" therefore assumes a fundamental social role in minimizing the possibility of contagion, while continuing our own activities. According to the results of the Smart Working Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan, however, there are still many companies, and in particular SMEs, disinterested in the topic.

The lack of practical information on the subject makes it difficult to "trust" these new tools. In this regard, we at ITER felt the need to deepen a series of concepts that could be useful in approaching a reality so far little known. Our team has therefore created a document (and a page) that can be consulted in which anyone who needs it can find the information for an optimal and profitable management of this tool of work facilitation.

The maxi experiment of agile work on a massive level is in fact immediately applicable, thanks to the implementing decree n.6 of February the 23rd, which provides for urgent measures regarding the containment and management of the epidemiological emergency; in particular: "the suspension of working activities for companies [...] with the exception of those that can be carried out in home or remote mode".

However, as Mariano Corso, Scientific Manager of the Smart Working Observatory of the Polytechnic of Milan, underlined, it is necessary that: «Workers, and especially those who are already Smart Workers, return the credit of trust by demonstrating autonomy, commitment and sense of responsibility».

Introducing: Scarlett AI Translate, the new powerful feature that allows you to automatically translate your reports in other languages, thanks to Artificial Intelligence algorithms powered by the Amazon Web Services. If you performed some activity for a foreign customer, you don't need to know the native language to submit your report: Scarlett AI Translate will do it for you... magical!

======== Scarlett AI Translate ========>

That's not all! Here's what the new release brings you:

• A much better offline experience, to continue working on your reports even when you're not connected! ✈️
• You can now sign the reports while you're offline! ✏️
• We improved how we manage the activities which span on more days. 📅
• Many various bug-fixes! 🐞
• The physical back-button on Android understands when you want to close the app. 🔙

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

• New field: billed hours! ⏱
• New connector for your sources: Scarlett! 🎈
• A better PDF report 🧾
• A more flexible tracks search 🔎
• Updated media management (avatars & logos) 🖼
• Unified login with IDEA services 👥
• New subscription plan: Horace Gold 🥇

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

The agenda has arrived! You can now manage multiple calendars – privately or shared with your teams – to organise your appointments directly within Arthur.

You can link external services such as Google Calendars and Microsoft Outlook, to have your events always synchronised between your services.

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

• You can now choose a project when you insert activities so that you can track costs 🗂
• Integrate Horace to easily take track of your time! ⏱

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

Team ITER IDEA

One of the strengths of the concept of "app" is the fact that they focus on solving one (and one only) major problem, instead of confusingly trying to achieve everything "from the same menu". This approach leads to quicker, smarter and more powerful solutions that can act as assistant throughout the day, based on your personal schedule.

On the other side, when you have too many different services at your disposal, you risk on losing efficiency, integration and functionalities, moving a step away from "the bigger picture". In fact, many services available on the web don't communicate with each other, they require different authentications, and they make the learning curve of their use steeper than needed.

When we tackled this problem,

our goal was to keep our services useful, simple and beautiful, but enabling a deeper integration

and an easiness of use that could have ran across the entire IDEA suite of products.

Today, we proudly present the result of our efforts – a unique authentication flow across all of our major services: IDEA's accounts & teams.

Thanks to this new paradigma, you will be able to use the same login info to access our services, and our apps will start to talk with each other – if configured as such.

From now when you insert an activity report in Scarlett, Horace will automatically add a time track for you for the same project!
You can see your planned activities and appointments across the suite, so you can wisely schedule the work of your team from any of the services!
You can manage your team and invite members from any of the services and decide who is enabled where.

What do you need to do to enable this change? Just be sure to have installed the latest version of Horace, Scarlett and Arthur.

And this is just the beginning: a whole new world of integrated features lies ahead – and we can't wait to show you more: stay tuned! 💡

In between the circa 8000 italian Innovation Manager, ITER counts seven people: Matteo Carbone, Guido Mazza, Annalisa Bertozzi, Corrado Bigliardi, Massimo Ghirardini, Matteo Magnani and Massimo Sola.

How this important result translates into practice? The Innovation Managers are enabled to offer to SMBs consultancy finalised to support innovation processes in the field of digital and technological transformation. The Italian SMBs will be able to apply for the “voucher innovation manager”, i.e. a facility with a total budget of 75 millions of Euro, broken down by each of the years 2019, 2020, and 2021.

For further information, we attach the dedicated page of the Ministry of Economic Development's website.

Do you have any idea in mind? Let’s fulfil it together!

• Apps are available on iOS App Store and Google Play Store! 👩‍💻
• A more powerful dashboard supports you in the organisation of your daily activities 🤖
• You can now draft an activity without specifying the model, the dates or the assignees: keep track of the requests and choose when to deal with them! ⌚️
• Attach resources, images, videos and documents to your reports, to make them even more complete and useful! 📎
• Improved offline experience, now available only through iOS and Android apps 💾
• Select the vehicles you used to reach your destinations and monitor travelling hours and km 🚙
• Refer to customer's contacts to easy the communication and the report delivery 👥
• General improvements on speed, stability and a renewed User Interface 🌟
• Several bug fixes 🐞

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

• You can now set follow-up actions and reminders over your activities: you won't forget what comes next 🔔🔜
• Set up a Resource Center for your team, to share documents with your colleagues and to link resources to your entities 📚
• Various UI/UX improvements: Arthur is beautiful and easy to use as never before 🌟
• A picture would be perfect to enrich your activity content? 📸 You are looking for a way to attach a document or a spreadsheet to your entities? Upload & go! 🖇️
• New graphic components to know who/when updated your resources 🔎
• Setting the duration of an activity is faster and clearer 🕑
• Many minor fixes and improvements 🧬

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

• The cold start is now way faster. 🏎
• New feature: duplicate track. ✌️
• New button "Today" in the dashboard. 📅
• Improved "on wake up" feature on the devices. 😪
• Bug-fix change of team, in some scenario.
• Bug-fix other users' track registrations
• Bug-fx change of avatar, on some browsers.
• Bug-fix complex track descriptions on PDF reports.

If you have fresh ideas to improve the service or something to report to us, we are glad to hear your feedback! 🙌

The absence of a recognised standard, together with the complexity of an extraordinarily variegated scenario, determines a continuously evolving market. Inside of it, the major cloud providers and many OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) propose their own platforms and their own "standards". In Italy, the initiative "Piano Industria 4.0" aims to digitalise and standardise the manufacturing scenario, interconnecting machines and integrating them inside the company software and processes.

Despite the grants available, the potential of this new paradigma still remains unexpressed, particularly in the world of the SMEs,

where the processes to interconnect systems and gather data are often inexistent or not structured enough.

With these premises, we couldn't let go of the opportunity of widening our expertise on the subject. Therefore, I decided to take part in an international program supported by the European Union, which focused on the new technological trends of the manufacturing area and the IoT platforms for "Industry 4.0". The program ran over two weeks, and it featured many speeches and exciting case history, held by authorities of the field. The event gathered more than fifty people, in between students and young professionals, from all over the world. The objective was one: to prototype new IoT solutions and present them to a jury of professors, start-ups and industrial partners, such as Siemens, BMW and Atos.

The entire experience happened in the suggestive Faculty of Informatics of the Technical Universit (TUM) of Munich, one of the most innovative campuses in Europe. As a start-up incubator, it takes advantage of prestigious collaborations and partners to favour its new projects.

During the experience, we could count on the support of a team of professionals of Futurice, a company working on digital innovation that offers consultancy in project management, in the creation of digital strategies and in the transformation of innovative business models to be "ready for the future".

The people of Futurice guided us in different project phases: analysis of requirements with the stakeholders, designing and conceptualization, definition of the MVP (Minimum Valuable Product), etc. The prototyping was structured following modern paradigms named LSC (Lean Service Creation), that find their roots in the Agile mindset; a process very similar to how we usually work on our projects.

Gathered a cross-functional team, we worked on the prototyping of a new solution to monitor the status of industrial plants and to guarantee the quality of processes that feature many rural and manufacturing realities. The plan was, therefore, to design a distributed system able to communicate, as an add-on, with physical and digital pre-existing systems. By taking advantage of the computational power and connectivity of Edge devices, the generated data is transferred in the cloud, through API interfaces and secure connections.

Finally, we presented the result to an audience of professionals of the field, that offered their contribution and food for thought on our project.

This formative experience gave us new insights on the hot topic of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Furthermore, it confirmed how the potentiality of cloud infrastructures, API interfaces and mobile apps stand as enabling technologies for the manufacturing field. Many new and sparkling ideas to concretise together with our partners: join us!

The first two, Social Media and Multichannel Marketing, are essential in the era of sharing, connection and communication. The new generations (and by now also the old ones) feel natural to search for information, entertainment and distractions in the social platforms and, more in general, in the network. At the same time, this influx of different communication channels forces companies to be present with their brands on various platforms, that are becoming each day more personal and direct.

The remaining six pillars affect us directly because they represent everything that we are investing in and that we know to be vital for any company that wants to surf the innovation wave directed to the future.

Mobile: smartphones are nowadays our interface to the world and our primary source of information: who would ever dream of leaving home in the morning without our mobile device? Statistics speak clearly: since 2016, mobile internet usage has surpassed desktop usage. Hence, it's essential to have internal company tools available on the move and running over devices with small displays. Accessing corporate servers over desktops is no longer an acceptable possibility. Not by chance, all IDEA's apps and services have mobile-first experiences, with user interfaces that adapt based on the size of the devices.

Platforms: it's where we share information with our networks (e.g. Facebook); they are becoming a standard of our private lives. So, why not transpose this perspective inside the company culture? Sharing information is today an essential element in the puzzle of the productivity of any team. We strongly believe in it, and that's why we build our services with a particular focus on teamwork and collaborative features.

Cloud: the most innovative companies know that the classic corporate server represents a milestone of a long time past. The Cloud overtakes the previous approach by power and flexibility, and besides, it's more affordable and secure. Luckily, it's not a privilege for few: not only the "big companies" but anyone can take advantage of the cloud computing possibilities; our mission is built upon this concept: "We build affordable yet powerful cloud services which innovate businesses, regardless of their size, nature or location".

Agile: until a few years ago, it was a small independent movement, but now has taken over in the way we organize any complex project. Agile, Kanban, Scrum: terms that got in the universal dictionary of any innovative entrepreneur; they understood how to achieve more results in less time, taking advantage of these new organizational strategies and tricks.

Big Data: we are surrounded by data; any device generates new information (also the fridge) and to interpret these data, finding relations with information generated by the company's processes and tools (like the time we spend on our different activities), allow us to be a step ahead of the competition.

API: if your services rely on ODBC connections and FTP data transfers, it could be the time to modernize your technological platforms. The Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) represent the future of data exchange because thanks to their flexibility allow (completely) different services to interact with each other. We use this technology in our products to integrate them with any ERP or corporate software whatsoever; from this new interaction, all the company processes are improved, with perceivable savings of time and costs.

And you? Do you already take advantage of IT services built upon these pillars?
If you are still in between Fred Flintstone and George Jetson and you are looking for a guide to leap towards innovation, we are here for you! 💡

In 2017, we took part in the first edition as participants, whereas this year we had the pleasure to join the event as official speakers. Saturday morning, in the Job Factory area, I held a talk about technology, employability and mobility, where I tried to highlight the strong relationship between the three elements and all the benefits which follow.

A brief excerpt follows.

A period of mobility abroad (for studying or for working), strengthen our curriculum of soft-skills that hardly we would acquire in other contexts — experience shows (🇸🇪); studies tell us how employers are each day more fascinated by transversal skills like curiosity, problem-solving, tolerance, confidence, international experience, etc. In IDEA, we strongly believe in what mobility has to offer; hence we try to support it with our technology, as in the case of Papaya and other projects in the works (note down this name: Waffle).

At the same time, technology supports the interconnection between people, enabling experiences and contacts that a few years ago we considered unthinkable. Thanks to the web, it's easy and intuitive to access services coming from any part of the world; parallelly, we have the chance to offer our services to anyone, widening our horizons and our markets to a global perspective.

The generation we are living in is going towards an internationalised environment that will influence more and more the way we work, the people we interface with and the products and the services that we offer.

Entering this ecosystem, of mobility and technology, allows us to establish a process of continuous improvement, generating each day new opportunities, to innovate ourselves and the world.

Therefore, full speed ahead, towards new horizons and new technological possibilities.

Papaya is the award-winning service that allows European Universities and Local Sections of the Erasmus Student Network to manage welcoming programmes that aims to integrate and make feel at home international students which are spending a semester or year abroad.

It takes advantage of Machine Learning and cloud capabilities to pair exchange students and local students with a resulting high degree of affinity, enabling the seconds to help the firsts in different projects, like: Buddy System, Language Tandem and many others.

Papaya has already matched tens of thousands of users, in more than 100 universities from 20 countries in Europe. During the years, it has been presented in many countries all over the continent, it won different awards and it was mentioned in many digital and physical newspapers.

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Horace is a time-tracking service. It allows you to easily and quickly track how you spend the time over your different activities. The service gives its best in collaborative and team scenarios.

What do we mean by Activity? It is what we want to track over time, answering questions like:

• How much time do we dedicate to a task or a process?
• How we usually use our time during the day, the week or the month?
• How much a particular project costed us?

Horace allows you to link many services, from which to acquire the activities; each team can configure one or more data sources as Trello, GitHub, Excel spreadsheets or compatible APIs. The structure we designed makes us easy to connect anything to Horace: the data you use is stored somewhere else? Let us know!

Curious enough to discover more?

Let's start the tour to discover the features of Horace and how it can help you to organize your team and your daily work better.

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Are you interested or do you have any questions? Contact us!

Arthur is a service designed to support teams in smartly manage the profiling of different entities and in the collaborative share of data.

Arthur is an ERM (Entity Relationship Management), a platform that allows you to define in complete autonomy the processes and the method with which to monitor the entities of interest. It enables you to map strategic information on the move and from any device, to identify relations that flourish business processes.

One of the key strengths of the platform is the flexibility, i.e. it adapts to different uses cases; a few examples? Agents and sales forces, marketing and communication managers, projects and team leaders: anyone can have considerable benefit.

Arthur offers API interfaces to sync data with external sources as ERPs, compatible services and other software.

Highlighted features:

• Configure infinite entities with their own custom fields and options.
• Organise the users in groups, to control the access to your Entities.
• A clear picture of "who can do what", so you always have control.
• Take advantage of Models to shape your activities reporting in multiple ways.
• Find what you're looking for: advanced search for activities and entities.
• Don't know where to look for? The global search finds it for you, wherever it is!
• A comprehensive dashboard helps you to keep track of what the team is doing.

Curious enough to discover more?

Let's start the tour to discover the features of Arthur and how it can help you to organize your team and your daily work better.

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Luigi is the warehouse assistant that you need! It supports teams to smartly manage the typical warehouse operations: inventory, in&out flows and stock analysis. Your team will be able to work (even offline!) in collaborative mode, and you will always have everything under control.

Main features:

• One tool to centralise all your main warehouse activities.
• If the device supports it, it will be possible to scan the 1D&2D barcodes of your products instantly.
• It supports alternative search codes, lots and serial numbers.
• You can create custom scanning rules.
• Multiple contemporary stocklists, for a more flexible management fo the inventory.
• Full control on the in&out flows to/from your warehouse.
• Set up your shipments in different packages, of which you can manage the external aspect and optional attachments.
• Many minor support features, as the scan error checking, the quick change of warehouse/site, the serial number unicity, and many more.
• You can work offline!

It offers API interfaces to synchronize data with external resources such as ERP softwares and other platforms and services.

Curious enough to discover more?

Let's start the tour to discover the features of Luigi and how it can help you to organize your team and your daily work better.

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IDEA stems from the experience gained in years of collaboration with our partners and realization of industry projects, from our desire to innovate and from a continous will to move towards new technologies. All aspects that, once combined, play a decisive role in our mission: to establish an innovation path that can bring technology at the service of the processes, to improve them and to create new value.

In this new article of our, we have the pleasure to present a showcase extremely significative, one of the important steps undertaken by our partners inside a strategic process that takes advantage of all the resources available in the external world, supported by the most recent technologies. Being a part of this process, through our products and services, makes us remarkably proud.

First of all, our partner...

ATK® is today worldwide leader in the manufacture of low weight bindings for mountaineering, acclaimed by North and South America as well as Japan for the quality and performance of their innovative products for races, touring and freetouring. ATK® stems from a reality strongely binded to technology, in the very heart of the popular Motor Valley of the Emilia Romagna region, where innovation and mechanical products are daily designed, implemented and exported worledwide. Within two years, ATK® managed to conquer, together with the gratest of the champions, all the ski mountaineering competitions, being recognized as the best of the planet thanks to one of its most popular bindings. A continuous research and a strong will towards state-of-the-art techniques allow to continuosly develop new models, drammaticaly lowering the weight of the materials, ensuring at the same time top performances and high reliability.

The rapid development of the company in the last years was only possible thanks to an optimization of the processes, the digitalization of the entire document flow and the growth of the sales network. Inside this vibrant enterprise scenario, our project aims to optimize the operative management of the warehouse, focusing on the preparation of the product orders that, leaving ATK's locations, are delivered to partners and shops in 25 countries worldwide.

The intention is to support the workers through a smart and intuitive solution (integrated with the already used system) to ensure a speed-up, more control and efficiency in the daily operations of the logistic department that, during the critical period manages the shippment of more than 1000 codes, organized under 120 different types. A new infrastructure able to revolutionize time-consuming practices in the logistic workflow... but how? By centralizing the control logics, often redundant and inefficient, offering new ways to schedule the activities of the working team, constantly synchronized with the other departments of the back office.

The design and the killer features

Performances and availability, A scalable infrastructure and computational on-demand power, to support featuers and complex logics. Service availabiity ensured by the typical Cloud Service Level Agreements, to be always up&running.

User Experience (UX), The user experience was designed to offer a quick access and functioning during the shipment phases: smart searches, barcode scanning and summary dashboards on the orders status.

Team and control, A new concept of team as a way to reach hight standards for processes, through the sharing of information between all the departments and their players: a shipment planning based on the occupied resources with a punctual situation of the warehouses availability.

Usability and hardware, Multiplatform usability, guranteeed through an optimized rendering on most of the recent smartphones, tablets ad computers (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, etc.), ensuring control from any location, even remotely. PowerUp when using Touch Computer devices with 1D e 2D integrated scanners. The app allows to use all the possibilities of a fast scan reader, coupled with the support for the DataWedge technology to set rules and formats of reading, all synchronized via Google Mobile Services (GMS).

Integration and synchronization, Secured and certified back-end SaaS services, offered through an API that can be used to link any ERP software, to benefit the whole company. A couple of examples? In a few clicks the back-office can transfer in the hands of the warehousemen the updated situation of the stocks, it can share the newly acquired orders of delivery and it can have back the scanned data in an automatic process that generates documents and reports of the whole logistic process.

Curious about the results we obtained?

Show me the numbers, and not only...

A 30% save of the shipment time and an increment of 75% of the shipped codes, compared with the previous season.*

Not only numbers: the logistic managers of ATK® report a general improvement of the working conditions, a simplified management of the work and a better control on the documents generated. Mario played a central role inside the major internal processes and it's the perfect fundament to develop a new departement, favoring the introduction of new human resources that could use the user-friendly and innovative platform at it's best, leading to a more and more efficient team.

Agile development and continuous improvement

Loyals as always towards our Agile methodologies, the development has never stopped and the app is costantly updating with new functionalities and improving, deliverable after deliverable.

Stay connected, new showcases are coming. Contact us and we will enlighten you!

Regardless of the type of business, each company has a simple, but fundamental need: to always keep an eye on its important information.

With Max, you can organize and customize dashboards with indicators and KPIs, to display your precious data on computers, smartphones, tablets and, last but not least, TVs and monitors.

Max offers API interfaces for synchronization with external sources such as ERPs or other databases.

Thanks to a socket technology, any data provided will be updated in real-time (live) in all active dashboards on registered devices: access your information anywhere!

Curious enough to discover more?

Contact us: we will study together how to link your data sources to Max.

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We've already spoken about Papaya in the past (Papaya! Web apps for everyone): the app, developed in collaboration with the Erasmus Student Network Modena association, that allows to automatically match in pairs local and international students — getting rid of an onerous manual process, aiming to ensure a deeper integration and to offer a better support to exchange students.

Why are we here again, speaking about it, after several months?

Without anticipating the final, here's the whole chronicle.

The app started its path at the dawn of 2017 when, from the need of the volunteers of Modena, this project was born, bringing a consequent drastic reduction of the amount of work to do to get things done: from weeks of effort to a few hours of work.

After some month of use, we started to gather the first feedbacks, identifying accordingly the improvements on which to work on, reported by the experience of both local and international students: this cosmopolite conglomerate of opinions generated a series of cycles of "inspection and adaptation", typical of our Agile development methodologies, that brought the app to assume a more mature and surely more complete appearance, compared to the initial one.

We are not just talking about new functionalities: the entire User Experience, i.e. the ways the user can enjoy the app, was revised and refined; this, together with a complete graphic restyling, brought the enthusiast community around the project to spread the word about the potential of the service.

Approaching Summer, they were already many the membership requests to the system from other Italian sections of the Erasmus Student Network; but not only: several other European realities announced their interest toward the app. Riding this wave of requests and feedbacks, we renewed Papaya so that could accept all the associations which could have applied for it: the scalable technological structure of the app, based on the Cloud infrastructure of the Amazon Web Services allowed us to satisfy this demand, making us able to offer Papaya to thousands of international users.

Shortly thereafter, the boom: the invite to present the project to the Minister of the Instruction, University and Research (MIUR), in a partecipation inside the National Mobility Day, happened last September; an immense honor, completed by the possibility to show to the International Relations Offices (URI) of the Italian Universities attending the event, the potential of a project so important for the welcoming of the exchange students. All of this, combined to the comunication started by ESN Italy, increased further the spectrum of interest and the number of membership requests in Papaya, so much to arrive even... in a castle in Lithuania.

During the first weekend of October, we took part to the 33° Lithuanian National Platform, an international event that allowed us to present Papaya at the suggestive venues of the castle of Raudone. To the presentation followed a small workshop, an opportunity to discuss the state of art of tutoring projects like the Buddy system, for all the sections and the associations involved. Given this recent success, as in a sort of tour, we will be in Hungary, in Budapest, next November.

Could it be better than that? Indeed, in fact,

together with ESN Modena, we had the possibility to partecipate to a wonderful contest that showcases the best practices to facilitate the international students and the volunteers whom support them: l'ESN Showcase of the South West region of Europe (South West European Platform - SWEP). The event, held in Milan a few weeks ago, also wanted to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the mobility program par excellence: the Erasmus programme. Following an interesting conference, an amazing flag parade through the central streets of the city and after a couple of days full of small sessions and workshops, Papaya reached the final of the competition.

In the gorgeous venue of Palazzo Lombardia, following a charming galà dinner, the proclamation of the prize-winners is finally arrived. We proudly and happily announce

the victory of Papaya and of ESN Modena for the best practice of Europe's South West region!

Many good feedbacks, in short, the result of an optimal mix of good communication, of a united community and of a platform, Papaya, built over a solid Cloud structure, scalable and offered in an attractive interface, through an immersive user experience.

The recipe with which we create all of our apps!

Let's build together our next success story. Contact us and we will enlighten you!

Way back in 2007, Steve Jobs astonished the world with the presentation of the first iPhone. At that time, Apple's wonder-phone contained a mere dozen of apps, without the possibility of installing new ones; since then, the situation has surely evolved: App Store, Google Play Store, Windows Phone Store and similars contain in their catalogues millions and millions of apps.

So many, that there is an app for just about anything.

They are few those moments of our daily life which don't include, directly or indirectly, an app of our smartphone: from the alarm that wakes us up, to the one that tracks our morning runs, from the maps that lead us to the office, to our loyal virtual to-do list; there are apps that allow us to order the lunch and other ones that help us monitoring our calories (or our hydration). Pictures, messaging, social networks... the list of the digital tools on which we count in our everyday is getting longer each day, even more so with the upcoming of new smart devices, like tablet of different shapes, smartwatches, fitness trackers, etc. Even at work, in many contexts,

the apps are replacing the classic PC program.

A few jobs has been even revolutionised by the apps introduction; one only need think of agents who have on their tablets the entire catalogue of selling products, with the possibility of preparing orders based on the real-time situation of the warehouses. Another case are the technichians who install and manage machines of different nature: they have at their disposal entire knowledge bases to help them to quickly solve problems, as well as the possibility to fill in intervention reports through vocal dictation, attached pictures and digital signatures.

The key words of the app approach are: speed, mobile, connnectivity; the entire consuption of web contents changed consequently: as is clear from the report below, since 2014 the global number of mobile users surpassed the desktopones and since then the gap widened from year to year.

So what is it, given the undeniable advantages in terms of productivity, that can stop us from the introduction in our business of an app which can be tailor-made to suite our daily workflow?

The first of the problems, it is surely the one regarding costs,

even more so in a small-medium enterprise context. Developing for mobile devices means to design and produce an app for all of the different devices (based on their operating systems): an app developed for iOS can't be installed on an Android device. Hence, to reach all the potential customers (or employees, considering the BYOD – Bring Your Own Device movement), I would have to release an app for at least 3-4 different piattaforms, with designing and developing costs multiplied for each different destination.

Are our dreams of mobility ending here? Certainely not: to help us, a few years ago, web apps are arrived, i.e.

all the applications usable from any browser.

Some notable example? Facebook, Washington Post or Gmail.

Let's shed the light on this: everything we called so far "app" will take the attribute of native. The native apps, are in fact the ones that can be installed on a device through an app store; the web apps, as we have seen, are the ones which are usable through a browser without the need of being installed, but with a mandatory connectivity requirement. Actually, web apps can be "installed" too, in the homescreen of a device, so that they can be accessed as every other native app.

Here we open a parenthesis: also the classic computer is included in the compatibility list of a web app (always through a browser). Thanks to the definition of a responsive structure, we can built an effective user experience, through the re-arrangement of the contents, independently from the screen size of the device.

Let's confront:

• PRO native apps: speed, user experience, offline capability, access to the whole feature set of the device.
• PRO web apps: access from every kind of device (mobile or desktop), lower development costs.

The battle between native and web apps would then see the second ones still in disadvantage, compared to the possibilities offered from the first ones. Luckily for us,  Google partied for the web apps, and over the last years leaded an idea that took the name of Progressive Web App (PWA). Progressive, because

they try to reduce, progressiely, the gap with native apps,

through the increment of the performance, a boost in the user experience and to the possibilty to access to features like offline capability, push notifications and many others. According to Alex Russel, the mind behind the project, PWAs “... blur the line between Web content and apps, but they keep the strengths of the Web.”.

That's how a PWA must be (according to Google):

• reliable: load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
• fast: respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
• engaging: feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.

PWAs manage the majority of the business needs.

Are they therefore the panacea for all evils? There are still a few cases that can't be efficiently managed from a PWA; e.g. games or more generally all those applications with an important graphic compartment (actually, also in this case the gap is narrowing) or that require access to specific featuers of a device (bluetooth, gyrospcoe, accelerometer, etc.). End of the road?

Not yet: there are tools that help you developing a web app in the classic way, but generating also native app packages without any effort in term of time and energy.

Halfway between magic and technology,

frameworks like Ionic appeared, allowing the design of a web app that can access to the majority of the featurestypically available to a native app and that can be uploaded on the main app stores of the market (App Store, Google Play Store, etc.).

Checkmate? Opinions are still discordant on the web, but is undeniable that (progressive) web apps have considerably narrowed the gap with native apps, holding at the same time all the advantages coming from a single source code base, intendet to be run from any kind of device.

In IDEA we strongly believe in these new technologies and that's why we build on them the majority of our projects.

What about you? Are you interested in boosting your business, by optimizing your company's workflow? Contact us: we will gladly reply to your questions!

Our mission is clear: technology is something marvellous and it shouldn't be available only to the biggest companies; anyone can improve its own productive process, through the introduction of smart tools, nice to see and easy to use. And we are not only talking about companies; privates, insitutitions and associations: everyone is included in the innovation process.

Today, in fact, we bring you Papaya as example; it's the web app we developed for ESN Modena, a small student association part of the bigger Erasmus Student Network (ESN). The motto is “students helping students”: they are volunteers which, during their academic years, offer their own free time to help international students whom come to study in the italian universities for a limitated period of time (usually, 6 months up to 1 year).

ESN Modena, which has just celebrated its tenth years of activity, counts about 25 active members who responds to more than 300 exchange students each year, in the cities of Modena and Reggio Emilia. In its integration and inclusion process of foreign students in the culture and customs of the area, the association offers different projects. Three, in particular, affect our case history:

Buddy system: The Buddy system is a project that aims to integrate and make feel at home the international students, from their earliest days in their new cities. Each Erasmus can ask to receive a a local student as a tutor - the Buddy - who will be there to answer his/her questions, to clarify his/her doubts and that will help him/her take his first steps in the new city.“;

Language tandem: “Do you want to learn or improve another language? We will assign you a tandem partner who speaks the native language that you need! In return, your partner will be interested in the languages you speak so you'll both have the opportunity to improve in front of a coffee or a cup of tea.”

Pick-up system: “You are just arrived in your new city, ready for your brand new adventure. And now? Do you need a helping hand to carry the luggages in your new flat? Our pick up system is exactly what you need! We will do our best to find a Buddy who will come and pick you and your luggages up at the train or bus station (or even the airport), taking you then home, safe and sound.”

The three projects are based on the match of a Buddy — a local student whom lives in Modena o Reggio Emilia, with an exchange student, allowing the Buddy to offer its own time to make the foreign student's life easier, obtaing in exchange a multicultural experience, the boost of a forign language or, simply, a new friend.

Before Papaya, the projects were managed through the listing of manual or electronic forms that would have been read from the responsible for the project, who would have gone through the whole lists, trying to find the perfect match for every international student, contacting then (by telephone or email) the two parts of the match.

The Papaya era has seen the introduction of a web app which, through the log in with Facebook, allows to strongly limit the piece of information that the user has to fill in, speeding up the access to the system.

Once inside the app, the user can subscribe to one of the above-mentioned projects: the Buddies offer their help, whereas the international students ask for a new mate.

At this point, every projects' responsible will be notified of the new requests and, through a clean and intuitive interace, he/she will have the possibility to evaluate who could be the best Buddy for each exchange student.

Users attributes and other information (as the “Likes“) coming from the Social Network are at the service of the project's chief to help him/her to achieve the perfect match; after the latter, a notification is immediately sent to the two parts to inform them of the good news.

Loose leaves? Complex Excel spreadsheets? Phantoms of the past!

And that's not all. We are designing an algorythm which will automatically suggest the ideal matches to the projects responsibles: this is how you reduce an tasks of several days in a few-minutes long job, thanks to machine learning techniques and a litle bit of magic.

Do you still have doubts about the effectiveness of an app to insert in your daily workflow, whatever nature is it about? Contact us and we will enlighten you!

To introduce ourselves, we got inspiration from a Ted Talk of Steven Johnson which goes perfectly with the base principles of this new path of ours. In his conversation, Steven tries to identify the perfect environment where good ideas can born, a sort of "creativity space". Word is that the Illuminism was born following spreading of intellectual streams in the British cafes: the informal and open-space nature of the cafes would as a matter of fact bring toghether people with different backgrounds, skills and knowledge, allowing them to meet, talk and to share ideas or to create new ones.

“No, we are not opening a cafe — not yet.”

The dictionary is rich regarding terms which describe the moment of inspiration — the ideas: flash , stroke of genius, “Eureka!“ moment, lightbulb moment… those vocabularies share the assumption that an IDEA is a single entity, something which happens in a single, wonderful and enlightening moment.
To confirm or prove wrong this teory, the researcher Kevin Dunbar tried to observe, by installing video cameras and microphones in different research labs, the instant in which an IDEA concretizes and under which circustances it happens. What he discovered was that good ideas wasn't generated at the scientists and engineers' desks, but in the weekly meetings in which the researchers shared the data collected and they discussed everything that was working and all those things which weren't going as expected. That's why we love so much the Agile methodologies, Scrum and the retrospective moments.

Darwin, in its own autobiography, told about the moment in which, in October, 1838, had the "flash" about is theory of evolution while he was reading a paper of Malthus about the population. The lightbulb moment. Decades later, the academic Howard Gruber started to analyze Darwin's nootebooks and he had a major breakthrough: the scientist had the core of his entire theory of the evolution and natural selection monthsbefore his stroke of genius; all the information was there, already written on the paper.

“Darwin incubated the IDEA — the concept, long before, but it wasn't still able to "think it completely", to realize it.”

At a biological level, an IDEA is a network at its primitive level: a new configuration of our brain which didn't happen before. All of us have a lot of ideas at an embrional stage, in a little corner of our brain, incubated. Everything that is needed to concretize them is an external incentive — as in the case of cafes, another IDEA to combine to our own, to generate innovation. If you have an IDEA and you put it together to another one, in the right envirnoment, you can obtain somehting greater that the sum of their parts.

“We had an IDEA.”

Therefore, this is what we want to symbolize for you, by developing apps and web services: innovation by taking advantage of the newest technologies, contributing with our knowledge and passion to fuse with your intuitions and competences, obtaining something not reachable by working separately.

“We want to be your bright IDEA.”