INTERVIEW WITH STEFANO SCAGNETTI AND STEFANO TRAVAGLIO FROM EIGHT TWENTY
Speaking of Time to Production… why is it such an important feature for future-oriented companies?
Stefano Scagnetti
First of all, let’s explain in a few words what we mean by Time to Production in 820. For us it means being able to give our customers the required solution in a very quick time frame, speeding up as much as possible all stages of putting the solution into production, from the moment of the drawing up to the testing one. It is one of our distinctive values on the market, we consider it a critical success factor, not only for us but also for our customers:
- It allows them to introduce technological solutions that can have a positive impact on their business, in a short time, in markets that are constantly changing and which, therefore, require rapid reaction times;
- They can carry out projects at a very competitive cost, as development and production days are extremely short;
- Projects that are too long often frighten and/or tend to lose their effectiveness the longer the implementation time gets longer, people lose their driving force involved in their daily work, being able to propose projects with a close goal stimulates the people involved and strengthens their energy because they see the goal within their reach.
When we talk about time to production, we are not referring only to the first implementation, but also to the evolutionary phases of the project, which can take the form of functional change requests or more structured evolutionary requests, such as the enlargement of the perimeter of the processes involved or the modification of the current ones. The speed of production allows the customer to benefit from the continuous improvement of their processes over time.
Stefano Travaglio
I also think of time to production as a characteristic that distinguishes us and does so in all phases of the work. We have the implementation part, in which we aim for optimal times, but we also carry this value in the management of the platform over time, for example in the updates we bring to the processes.
Speaking of the platform, how does SINTROPI achieve these results?
Stefano Travaglio
SINTROPI is a proprietary technology that we have developed precisely with the customer in mind and which includes all the elements that allow us to be fast while offering a product that is customized to the individual’s needs. Basically, it represents the best of both worlds.
How do we do it? First of all, with the know-how of a team that has 20 years of experience and shares a passion for quality, which then flows into our technological choices.
SINTROPI is a block system, therefore a low code solution with elements that can be reused and customized for the customer. This allows developers to drastically limit the time spent writing code, thereby reducing errors and improving lead times.
The architecture chosen is the microservices one , which is both sophisticated and light, and the platform lives in the cloud where scalability but also security and encryption are present by design.
The integration part is also equally important. Being able to plastically and quickly accompany customers in the analysis at the application level of their existing environments, defining the integration activities towards the internal applications that customers consider indispensable, and then being able to design new experiences at a functional level and UX in SINTROPI represents a factor critical of project success and user satisfaction.
To be able to operate quickly in this way, it is important to have the right internal skills and to own the platform, elements that distinguish Eight Twenty and determine its uniqueness.
Stefano Scagnetti
We have accumulated an important level of experience, ranging in different. The result, however, is the same:
- We are able to create POCs within a few days, a maximum of one week, thus being able to give substance to the customer in order to then continue on his technological investment path. We have examples in the field of process solutions such as vendor scoring, intelligent document search with cognitive services, and complaints management.
- We completed complex projects in a few weeks, from design to testing. It is difficult to generalize, as the duration of the implementation can vary depending on the sophistication of the process, but we are always on the order of a few weeks. This is also true in cases of very branched processes, think of those of the Purchasing Department of large industrial companies or customers present in very vertical sectors such as automotive and security services, up to the Public Administration.
As already mentioned, these results are then applied to all the developmental phases of the projects, both in the functional and in the UX field, always keeping the concept of continuous improvement at the center.
Time to production: at the process level and at the interface level
Stefano Travaglio
Speaking of continuous improvement, in our platform, we are able to change the process based on the learnings of the existing process. This adjustment does not take place over extended periods of time, but it can be implemented and propagated in real-time, and thanks to the control over the metrics, we can immediately understand what impact we had.
A process that works is a monitored process. It is not just a question of enabling the forecasting of production times and capacity (whatis done), but also of identifying opportunities for improvement in how things are done. The know-how of a company is also this and has become the competitive advantage of some very interesting organizations.
A living process is always ready to change, precisely because the company is alive and ready to respond to the market (as Stefano said earlier) and cannot do so if it remains still. With SINTROPI, we can understand how things are done, verify the process velocity, understand where it slows down, and intervene on bottlenecks, identifying the steps that produce less value.
