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AGENTIL is proud to be a Gold Partner of this year's SAP Customer Experience Day, which will take place on a boat, departing from Lausanne, and taking you figuratively and quite literally, on a journey.

The goal of this SAP CX Day is for all participants to experience the fourth generation CRM Technology suite with SAP C/4 HANA.

What is it? SAP C/4 HANA is a CRM which unlocks a world of digital innovation, customer value and growth that builds trusted relationships between brands and customers and helps to manage the complete customer experience. (Source)

Our AGENTIL team members will be joining the event and presenting our expertise through a customer success story, regarding the implementation of the C/4 HANA CRM for one of our biggest clients. We will then be more than glad to answer any questions you might have and discuss how C/4 HANA can help you to seamlessly guide the customer journey from start to finish on a single platform through a new world of digital innovation. (Source)

When? 19th of September 2019, from 1:00pm to 6:00pm. The agenda is available here.

Where? The boat will depart from Lausanne-Ouchy, Quai Jean-Pascal Delamuraz 1, 1006 Lausanne 6.

Join our AGENTIL SME / SMB team for a « Discovery Breakfast »: this event is open to everyone, whether they are our customers or those who simply want to discover what SAP Business One is all about.

When? The Discovery Breakfast will take place on September 19, 2019

What time? From 8:00am to 12:00pm

Where? At our Geneva HQ: AGENTIL, Rue du Pré-de-la-Fontaine 19, 1242 Satigny

Register now

THE THEMES

• What's new in SAP Business One

Discover all of the new features of the latest SAP Business One version presented by our experts.

• Mobility with SAP Business One

Test our mobile applications for smartphones and tablets live and independently: Sales Mobile App and Service Mobile App.

• Analytical and reporting capabilities

What is SAP Analytics Cloud? What are the differences between SAP Business One SQL and SAP Business One HANA? Our team answers your questions to guide you in your analytical performance.

• Other needs, other solutions

Do you think a cloud solution is better suited to your needs? Do you need advice on your logistics and production management?

IF YOU ARE NOT A SAP BUSINESS ONE CUSTOMER

• What is the purpose of an ERP?

Discover all the features of the latest SAP Business One version presented by our experts.

• Test SAP Business One live

We provide you with demonstration spaces on PCs, smartphones and tablets so that you can navigate through the software and simulate your company's own processes.

• Need to evaluate your situation? 

Do you need advice on your business management? Benefit from a free mini audit of your current IT system and management tools with a consultant.

Talk directly with an expert about your issues and discover how AGENTIL can support you in your development.

To register for the event, click here. 

Discover, try and share. 

AGENTIL has decided to start a series of collective trainings regarding your ERP, SAP Business One. You will learn to make better use of your software, (re)discover its functionalities, share your user experience and deal with you personal issues. 

That’s the concept behind AGENTIL Academy's Trainings.

A team of experts will be available during a whole day to train you and teach you key points to use your ERP. 

Our second workshop will take place on June 20th, 2019 at our Geneva HQ and the subject will be Control and optimize your supply and logistics processes with SAP Business One. 

Please note that the event will be exclusively held in French.

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The content:

• Purchasing management - Optimize the purchasing cycle to increase margins

Master data management, procurement, MRP, accounting and reporting.

• Inventory management - Inventory allocation and control

Warehouse and inventory management, warehouse area management, goods receipt and issue control (pick & pack), alerts, reporting.

Master SAP Business One functionalities in purchasing, inventory and finance and adopt best-practices to improve your internal processes.

The training will be based on practical exercices on the demonstration environment developed especially for the training.

AGENTIL, and Scality are hosting the first ever collaborative event to present the future of flexible data storage. You are invited to learn more about software-defined object storage and how it could benefit your company.

Nowadays, organizations are looking for solid, easy-to-deploy storage that can keep up with growing data needs. 

Scality is ideal for customers who want a highly durable and accessible storage solution for their fast-growing data. With pre-validated designs that are proven to deliver high ROI, the solution is simple to order, deploy, and manage. Its architectural flexibility provides high-performance, scalable capacity for data-intensive use cases.  

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JOIN OUR EVENT

When? June 14th, 2019 from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm

Where? Four Seasons, Hotel des Bergues, Geneva

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AGENDA

8:30 am • Welcome & Coffee 

- Why is Object Storage interesting to you now? 

- Customer Testimonial: EPFL success story with Scality 

- Scality Scale Out Storage & Multi-Cloud Solution: Overview and Demo 

- Key Use Cases of the Scality Solution

- Added Value of Cisco UCS & Scality Architecture

12:30 pm • Lunch & Networking 

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About Scality

The Scality offering delivers a modern, best-in-class solution that overcomes the limitations of traditional storage to provide high-performance, scalable capacity for data-intensive use cases.

Two days for gathering information, meeting market providers and boosting your business!

Join AGENTIL at the LEC event during which you can attend conferences, meet experts, network and boost your company. Come meet our teams on April 9th and 10th at Geneva’s Palexpo !

Also, on April 9th, from 3:15pm to 4:00pm, Stig Wikberg (AGENTIL’s co-director) will be contributing to Sunstar’s conference regarding our implementation of SAP C/4HANA, alongside Christophe Imbach. You can learn more about this here.

To win your entrance to the event*, email us at marketing@agentil.com with the following details: first name, last name and company name.

*First come, first served, according to the number of available entrances.

Conferences will be held during the event on the following themes:

• BI, Big Data & AI
• Cloud
• eCommerce & Digital Marketing
• Modern selling
• Cybersecurity
• Business Software
• Digital workplace
• FM Tech

It’s the essential event for directors and decision-makers! Learn more about the event by visiting the LEC page.

When it comes to data centres, we sometimes fail to comprehend the importance of applications. This can lead us to neglect their protection when, in fact, they are a key element in driving business value.

Cisco, being fully aware of applications’ relevancy, created Tetration: a holistic workload protection for multicloud data centers. With its zero-trust model, Tetration will help you to quickly identify security incidents, contain lateral movement and reduce your attack surface.

At AGENTIL, we are very glad to be Cisco Partners and to be able to promote Tetration. We are also capable to endorse its capacity to protect both applications and servers through zero trust security policies.

Obviously, proof of a product’s efficiency should always come with a demonstration. On March 6th and 7th, Cisco and AGENTIL will be more than pleased to welcome you to the Workload Protection: Make The Invisible Visible workshop.

Two dates to attend the event:

• March 6th, 2019 at Cisco Systems, in Rolle
• March 7th, 2019 at the Hôtel des Bergues, in Geneva

For more information, feel free to contact Christophe Desperrier at christophe.desperrier@agentil.com

Discover, try and share. 

AGENTIL has decided to start a series of collective trainings regarding your ERP, SAP Business One. You will learn to make better use of your software, (re)discover its functionalities, share your user experience and deal with you personal issues. 

That’s the concept behind AGENTIL’s Training Thursdays. 

A team of experts will be available during a whole day to train you and teach you key points to use your ERP. 

The first workshop will take place on March 14th, 2019 at our Geneva HQ and the subject will be Making use of your financial data.

Please note that the event will be exclusively held in French.

The agenda :

• Welcome breakfast at 9:00am, with coffee and croissants.
• Morning: budgetary accounting with Daniel Nguyen.
• Lunch break: buffet lunch and discussions
• Afternoon: cost accounting with Patrick Stoeckli
• The event will end at approximately 5:00pm

To launch this event, we ask for a 300.-CHF participation fee per person. 

As the AGENTIL entities around the world continue to thrive and expand after being in business for more than twelve years, Jean-François Lauri, founder and CEO of AGENTIL Group has decided to bring a new member to the team to help him conduct the company through its growth. A co-pilot, in a sense. Therefore, we will have the pleasure to greet Stig Wikberg as co-leader of the Group starting February 1st.

From physics to IT

Although Stig is originally from Norway, he spent the majority of his life in Switzerland and studied physics at the EPFL in Lausanne.

If the connection between physics and information technologies isn’t quite obvious just yet, it sure makes sense when you learn more about how Stig ended up working for IBM for ten years.

As soon as he got his degree, he decided not to pursue a career in that field. Luckily enough, big IT companies were looking to hire young people who had a physics degree because these studies were considered quite broad and mind-opening.

He then got two job offers, one from IBM and one from SAP. He took IBM’s offer in the blink of an eye, as it seemed more appealing and included a crash-course in sales in Paris.

A decade at IBM and two decades at SAP

During his decade at IBM, Stig held various positions, such as head of International Organizations, development director of SAP activities at IBM, head of a major account…

When he felt like he had explored all of his options at IBM, he decided he needed a change and ended up working for SAP as head of the French-speaking Switzerland branch of the company.

The SAP office of the French-speaking Switzerland was about the size of AGENTIL today (about seventy people) and Stig enjoyed the flexibility and freedom that came with the job. It meant he could make decisions for this branch of the company without having to suffer from the complex administrative processes that these big companies usually enforce. And his office’s success was proof enough that everything was working out for the best.

On an amusing note, he met Jean-François Lauri back then, who was working for HP at the time.

While he thoroughly enjoyed his work as head of the office, he didn’t like as much becoming general manager for consumer industries afterwards. He was still getting great results from his work, but he found himself missing some kind of spark and went back to a position in sales (specifically, to sell S/4HANA Cloud), which he found to be very interesting. However, after twenty years, it was time for a change.

A new start at AGENTIL

When Stig was offered by Jean-François to become co-leader of the AGENTIL Group, he found it to be a great opportunity. Of course, his experience in the IT department and particularly in the SAP world are going to be invaluable, but he very much likes to focus on the human and social aspects of AGENTIL’s development. What he thought lacked in his later experiences, he wishes to reinforce here. He definitely identifies with AGENTIL’s human values, such as trust, hard work, communication and being a sustainable company.

Also, one of Stig’s main focus is to help AGENTIL and its clients transition where the future lies, into the Cloud. Although Jean-François Lauri had already taken the decision to go forward with this transformation in the company, it’s a long but rewarding change that should further ensure AGENTIL Group’s customers’ success, as well as its own.  

Finally, to welcome Stig properly, we would like to leave you on two of his favorite quotes from Richard Branson, which perfectly illustrate what he would like to achieve at AGENTIL :

« If you look after your staff well, they will look after your customers. Simple. »

« Train people well so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t. »

Yesterday night, like every single year since 2006, we planned a corporate event in our Geneva HQ to celebrate the holidays with our team members and their kids.

A little cocktail was catered and we had a few drinks (non alcoholic, of course) and some festive snacks.

But that’s not all! The whole office was rearranged: desks were moved, Ethernet cables were unplugged, a Christmas tree and ornaments were installed… Our marketing team had brilliantly planned multiple games for the children, such as a race track with our Mini Tesla (too cute!), Nerf games and magic tricks! The least we can say is, the kids had fun… and so did the adults! 

Of course, Santa paid us an early visit and brought some gifts for each and every child present that day. This tradition is and always will be, close to our hearts. It creates lovely memories between our team members and their families, which is something we would love to perpetuate throughout the years. 

This year, AGENTIL was present at the professional fair of the UNEP (National Union of Landscaping Companies) and, after exchanging with many landscape gardeners, we have realized that only a few of them were using new technologies to manage their companies. 

However, from managing stocks and materials to automating quotes, and handling projects… construction companies aren’t short on solutions to digitize some daily tasks. 

In order to support our claims, here are a few numbers found in an article from KPMG, that confirm the observations we made during the fair. 

Integrating it in the company’s strategy? 

Construction companies are slowly but surely realizing the importance of technological innovations in their industry. Proof of that is that, when asked, 78% of company owners are conscious that digitalization is going to be a big part of their work. 

Business owners’ intentions go along with digitalization

But the assessment is quite clear: only a small amount of companies are fully equipped with adequate technologies! 

« 62% of construction companies still work with reporting systems that require a manual intervention from one of their co-workers » says KPMG 

Integrated systems, capable of exploiting the generated data, are present in only 8% of companies… 

We think that this low rate of « equipment » in the construction industry comes from the gap between the work itself and the digital world. A lack of time and maybe of interest for these new technologies would explain the hesitations that some owners would have to jump the gun. However, this step is crucial to ensure the durability and development of the company! 

If you’re still with us, we would like you to know that AGENTIL integrates management and mobility solutions, perfectly adjusted to very small businesses and SMBs in the construction industry. To learn more about what we can do for you, contact us or browse our Solutions' catalog.

When flying, pilots need to have all the right information right away. They rely on a technical team to do the maintenance, ensure the services but still keep an eye on the most relevant metrics. Why should it be different with SAP, probably one of your most critical IT system?

Sure, no lives are directly in play but isn’t the performance of your SAP systems impacting your business? Probably even in a critical way! And isn’t there any metric, apart from the standard technical ones, which a relevant for you to pilot your ERP?

When we regroup with SAP companies about their ERP monitoring, two cases stand out: either they have an internal basis team (maybe complemented with some externals) in charge of the technical support of their systems or they fully outsource this task to a service provider. This is probably very similar to the flight industry: either they have an external service provider or the service is done by their own teams. But in both cases, you probably know that the pilot (or the co-pilot) does a visual check before every flight and the crew has all kinds of indicators about the engines in the cockpit.

Do they only trust a static report per day, summarizing all events from the last 24 hours? Do they pretend they don’t care because someone else is in charge?

In the flight industry, this kind of attitude would seem completely crazy but the ERP world, it looks like the norm! SAP pilots are driving nearly blind (or in a reactive way) and rely mostly on technical checks done by someone else. What you won’t accept even for your own car (you still have “qualified metrics” all the time in front of the driver) is common in the IT world.

At AGENTIL, we believe SAP pilots should have a full and qualified view on the systems they are responsible for everyday, every second. This is how and why we designed the Pro.Monitor solution. Pro.Monitor concentrates years of SAP management experience and can be fine tuned by your SAP Basis specialists but, first and foremost, it provides relevant metrics within the SAP Cockpit. Data are where it makes sense (in the cockpit and not only in a daily static report) and can be consumed on the fly.

SAP Basis specialists can focus on the added value tasks with the confidence they will get alerts as soon as the pro-active threshold are reached. SAP Pilots (SAP Program managers, SAP CC managers, CIO’s) can have a graphical view on the system’s health, which includes technical but also business (security, logistic, finance, …) metrics.

And the data are where they will be consumed (within the service management platform like ServiceNow or aggregated to the general IT monitoring) to ensure a complete view with a single pair of glasses and, at the same time, avoid manual data transmission. Alerting is efficient. Problem solving is including automatically all important information.

If you wish to learn more about our solution, head to www.agentil-software.com and request your test drive today!

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

We have always prided ourselves in being an SAP Partner… and we’re even more proud to say that we’re still going on strong!

We have been recently notified that AGENTIL support center meets all SAP’s quality standards required for an automatic recertification of our Partner Center Of Expertise (PCoE) status.  

What does this mean for us?
AGENTIL is the first SAP Partner in French-speaking Switzerland to receive the automatic extension of our SAP Partner COE certification for two additional years, instead of going through the full SAP audit process. 

This means that the prerequisites for the recertification continuously measured by SAP (including the certifications and trainings of our consultants) upheld all SAP’s satisfaction to keep the AGENTIL support center certified as Partner Center Of Expertise without further reassessment.

What does this mean for our clients?
The PCoE status means that our maintenance clients can continue to trust the AGENTIL experts to maintain and support their SAP systems on the high level implied by SAP PCoE certification, with the best care and the best customer service. Our clients’ satisfaction is our priority and we intend to keep it that way!

Want to know more?
For more information regarding our certifications and partnerships, we recommend that you chat with us at info@agentil.com or click on the contact button, on your right!

Looking back at all the amazing exchanges we had during the past few days at the SAP TechEd event in Barcelona, we feel like participants are looking for more than typical innovations, as there is a real need for solutions which will help them manage the upcoming tidal waves.

Most of the company representatives we met had already made their choice : the SAP monitoring is done internally or outsourced. But, in both cases and based on the conversations we had with the service providers as well, there seems to be a lack of instrumentation. 

Even if it's a simple environment containing one landscape or the typical ones with ten to twenty or major companies with several hundreds, or even thousands of systems, we found optimisations that could, from day one, save several minutes per system and per day! My advice? Stop trying to make out how much you would save if you optimized your monitoring by, say, ten minutes per system per day. You would truly be horrified!

What an incredible resonance for our ServiceNow story! Nearly one out of two passer-by at our booth mentioned this topic. If only every SAP-ServiceNow company knew what we have built for ServiceNow between SolMan and ITOM, they would surely want to implement it in a heartbeat. And I’m pretty certain it’s the beginning of a love story between these two solutions...

Finally, this was the ideal stage to validate our focuses for FY19, and we can confirm that we really are at the right place, at the right time. A security audit report is key (you will hear about it in the future), as our agnostic approach which allows integration is welcome in this established market. We can see many possible collaborations with existing or future customers to enhance even more our solution.

Thank you and see you next year, SAP TechEd!

Want to learn more about how we can optimize the monitoring of your SAP systems? Contact us today!

What SAP TechEd taught us, in a nutshell :
- optimization > innovation,
- 60+ conversations which concluded with a primary demo (we nearly burned our demo man),
- concrete cases with 6-7 figure savings,
- the future of SAP will be combined with SNow,
- validation of our stories in our backlog.

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

Many companies outsource their SAP Landscape or, at the very least, its management.

Having a specialized partner makes sense: it means that, due to scaling effects, you can keep the best experts while the in-house teams can concentrate on running projects. But does this mean companies should be handing over all control over their own systems?

I can't even count the number of times I've heard of companies getting just one PDF report per day. Only one PDF report per day to assess the health of some of their most critical systems... I can't even count the number of times I've also seen companies get a 24/7 monitoring on hardware, network and else... but only one single report per day for their SAP environments.

We recently implemented our solution in a company which was in the process of outsourcing their whole SAP landscape. Our Pro.Monitor solution is their single pane of glass. Both the end customer and the service provider/outsourcer have the same view on the system. There are no discussions or subjective feelings regarding performance or reaction, and SLA is measured automatically with the integration into ServiceNow.

In light of that, AGENTIL Software has created Pro.Monitor to help you keep a trustful relationship with your partner and to keep an eye on your functional metrics, therefore avoiding any kind of argument in case of an issue. If you wish to know more about SAP Cockpit, our Pro.Monitor solution or our integrations between SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) and ServiceNow, visit our website!

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

Events and fairs are a whirlwind, honestly. They demand a lot of time and energy, whether you’re on the fair comity or marketing team, but if done correctly, they can be very rewarding. Most importantly, they’re the best opportunity to showcase your expertise to a select crowd which most likely shares the same interests as you. 

Last year, the AGENTIL team already participated in the Salon Progiciels in Annecy - which is a fair dedicated to innovative software packages and performance enhancements - and they got to live a great experience, running a booth, meeting prospects and future clients. Proof that this was a beneficial experience was… we decided to participate this year as well! 

On October 11th, in the early time of day, the AGENTIL France team (Christophe Dantin, Maxime Gandy and Carole Lacroix, from AGENTIL Media) headed to the event’s location to add the finishing touches to the booth and have a little team meeting going through the program one last time, before heading to the welcome party. 

The event’s theme was The performance equation: agility + digital + lean, which indicates that the aim of this fair was to have business owners confronted to the fact that companies need to be much more agile and turn towards Lean. Indeed, this new era of the digital industry needs for companies to adjust, in order to achieve higher performances levels and stay on top of the market.

The AGENTIL France team was present to demonstrate our expertise as ERP integrator (SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP S/4HANA) and got to meet potential customers all day long. 

Multiple workshops and conferences were available for visitors and Christophe Dantin hosted a workshop on How to manage your company to gain productivity? He demonstrated that ERP systems are the way to go to if you wish to grow a modern business, relying on a reliable system to host and gather your company’s information, boost and improve your productivity. 

Indeed, ERP softwares have come a long way since their first appearance in the industrial world in the 90's. If they use to be a way for manufacturers to improve the inventory management and supply/demand issues back then, they can now be useful for any type of company, big or small, to ease the internal processes. At AGENTIL, we believe each business is unique and, therefore, should have a unique system to work with. That's why we offer modular ERP systems so that employees can work only with the specific modules they actually need, increasing their productivity and the company's safety.

If you wish to discover which ERP would help your company transition into the digital era, don’t hesitate to have a chat with one of our experts!

On October 3rd and 4th, AGENTIL was very glad to participate in the HR fair (called Salon RH in French) in Geneva.

The goal of this event was to create a meeting point for all HR professionals, offering a global vision of the market on all innovative human resources products and services.  During two days, it was reported that more than 2500 visitors came to the HR fair to see the 160 exhibitors and assist to one of the 130 conferences.

AGENTIL was delighted to run a booth with a few members of the team and Roger Haenggi, from IBM, to meet the public and present its very own innovative solutions. 

Jean-François Lauri, CEO of AGENTIL Group, held a conference regarding digital collaboration and new ways to work. Indeed, digital transformation changes the way people work together by ruffling up the classic work dynamics we all know and offering employees new ways to be efficient in their daily tasks and team projects. If the idea of making an employee more efficient during his/her working hours can mainly be seen as a productivity issue for the company, it should mostly be considered as beneficial for the employees’ motivation. Getting to your goals quicker and in a more efficient way, spending less time responding to emails, not struggling to find corporate resources anymore, not waiting around for a colleague’s response to get the document you urgently need to finish a task… all of these (big) little things can greatly improve the way you feel about your work at the end of the day. Truly, it can increase morale more than you would think.  During his conference, Jean-François Lauri presented the latest fully customizable community work solution, called IBM Connections.

At AGENTIL, we are able to customize this collaborative work solution with your company’s visual identity to make it feel like ‘home’ and make your use out of it that much more enjoyable. If you wish to learn more about what IBM connections can transform the way your teams work, communicate and manage projects, contact us to start your very own digital transformation!

Social networks have never had such a significant place and impact in our daily routines as today. Even if they started out as a way to connect people in their personal lives, they’ve slowly but surely made their way into the workplace. 

Nowadays, collaborative work tools act the same way as social networks do : you can post updates, pictures, videos, use instant messaging, create groups... And there is no denying that these tools greatly facilitate the process of a group task. At AGENTIL, we make use of collaborative work solutions on the daily!

In 2007, IBM decided to jump on the bandwagon and started developing their very own collaborative work environment, called IBM Connections. This product is a team collaborative platform that helps employees become much more efficient and invested in their work projects. Plus, at AGENTIL, IBM Connections can be fully customized.

IBM Connections’ interface recalls the world’s most used social network and, with that being said, it’s a great advantage: it’s user-friendly and intuitive, therefore requiring absolutely no training support. 

The scenario is quite simple: anyone can create a community and invite their coworkers or even their customers to participate to the project, and share files, customer briefs and more. Having all ressources for a specific project stored at the same place is a real time-saver. Forget emails asking John where the presentation for your latest customer has been filed and waiting twenty minutes before having it sent to you!

Furthermore, you can choose to add competence tags to your employees, colleagues and self, helping you find the best person to carry out a task regarding a specific project. IBM Connections also has integrated social traces of knowledge, which would, for example, give you access to a former colleague's knowledge base as training.

All of these carefully crafted features ensure interactions are simplified and work processes are substantially improved. The forum sections allow all members of a same team to have focused conversations, accessible at all times, helping employees improve their effectiveness on the job. And this idea is reinforced by statistics showing that the use of a collaborative work tool such as IBM Connections can cut off 30% of email traffic.

At AGENTIL, we truly believe in time-saving solutions such as IBM Connections and can only vouch for their efficiency and convenience. However, we also think that a collaborative work tool should convey your company’s aesthetic and now offer to not only implement Connections in your workplace, but have it fully customized to your image and needs. 

During the HR Event in Geneva, the AGENTIL team was running a booth in partnership with IBM, presenting their innovative solutions. For this occasion, AGENTIL’s CEO, Jean-François Lauri also held a conference and was proud to demonstrate the customized interface of IBM Connections.

If you are interested in discovering all of the advantages of using IBM Connections and have it customized to your convenience, don't hesitate to contact us!

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Check out references for IBM connections :

The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2016: Shifting to Work and Outcomes (1) named IBM a leader in its evaluation of enterprise social network providers for the 4th consecutive year, citing IBM’s global presence, predictive analytics capabilities and growing partner ecosystem. 

The Constellation ShortList™ for Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites with Project Features (2) has recognized IBM Connections Activities for its combination of collaboration, social networking and project management capabilities.

 The Forrester Wave™: File Sync and Share Platforms: Cloud Solutions, Q1 2016 (3) named IBM a leader, citing the broad collaboration, file sharing and social analytics capabilities of IBM Connections Cloud. 

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Hybrid Solutions, Q2 2016 (4) cited IBM as a leader among the ten most significant providers of enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solutions with hybrid or on-premises deployment options.  

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace (5) named IBM a leader for the 7th year in a row, recognized for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks, Online Communities, and Innovation Management Market Shares, 2015: Innovation at Scale (6) shows IBM has maintained its #1 position in Core Enterprise Social Networks for the 7th consecutive year.

The Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise Social Networking Product 2016-17 (7) named IBM a Leader in its latest examination of the enterprise social networking landscape. 

1. The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2016: Shifting to Work and Outcomes, Sept 23, 2016
2. Constellation ShortList™ for Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites with Project Features, October 2016
3. The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Cloud Solutions, Q1 2016
4. The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Hybrid Solutions, Q2 2016
5. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, October 26, 2015. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
6. Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks, Online Communities and Innovation Management Market Shares, 2015:Innovation at Scale, August 2016, IDC #US41576016
7. Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise Social Networking Product 2016-17, October 27 2016

On October 2nd, the AGENTIL team participated in a very coveted conference in Geneva organized by Impact IA, called « Artificial Intelligence: towards a nomadic form of Work? ». Indeed, AGENTIL Group chose to sponsor a particular workshop during the event: « Woman in the Loop ». What was it all about? 

As a representative of women in tech and our very own innovation specialist, Sarah Bouhnick was asked to be a participant during the workshop. During the preparation phase before the actual event, the conversation rose in the AGENTIL Geneva offices about what being a « Woman in the Loop » actually meant.

Two major points were debated: 

• the clear under-representation of women in the tech world, 
• the place of the ‘feminine’ part in the process of human represented forms of AI.

This debate pointed back to Sarah’s exchange with Andre Guillen, marketing director of the Impact IA Foundation, as he interviewed her regarding Artificial Intelligence and a woman’s place in this still very masculine industry. 
You can watch Sarah's interview here.

For the workshop and conference, the AGENTIL team gathered a few members, including Sarah (of course), Jean-François Pietri (Transition Manager and Senior Consultant) and Carole Lacroix, head of the marketing department of AGENTIL Media. 

As the event began, experts, journalists and Laura Tocmacov Venchiarutti - Impact IA’s Managing Director - asked Sarah to join the press briefing, so that they get to the core of this event’s topic. They were joined by another one of the event’s sponsors, Visium, that debated on « Innovation and Entrepreneurship ».

A few minutes from the beginning of the press briefing, a journalist from the AGEFI newspaper asked Sarah «Why ‘Woman in the Loop’? Why this specific topic? » And the answer was quite simple: women need to take part in modeling the future and a part of this discussion. 

The briefing was neatly organized in little groups of twenty AI experts and journalists, discussing all subjects of the event’s conferences. As it ended, the public entered the event and took place into little workshops to contribute to the brainstorming of these same topics. 

« What exactly is Artificial Intelligence? » a woman asked. And the truth is, it’s a hard definition to give. « I believe that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t really exist yet. We’re more about intelligence of artificial things, if I can say so. That’s why I think we need to bring more women to the table and offer a different vision of this topic » Sarah answered. 

The debate continued with plenty of great arguments:

« I like the idea of a new societal organization, we need to re-think the word ‘relationship’ today, as the definition just might be transformed with and through technology. » 

« What if we didn’t need to work anymore? » - « But human beings will want to work in order to still have some sense of a social status and place in society » 

« What if it were a new society model? » - « Sure, but society is afraid of new ways of thinking. » 

As the debate went on, Sarah’s conclusions were that a woman’s place in the IT world isn’t really the subject. It’s more about redefining what is today’s reality but could be completely redefined tomorrow. But some questions remain unanswered for now: do we really need to add gender to the conversation, apart if it’s to push equality into our new societal constructions? Are we going to continue giving human characteristics to the technological lives we create? Will Artificial Intelligence always be influenced by humans, or can it become independent at some point? 

If you wish to discover AGENTIL's progress on AI solutions, come chat with us through the contact button on your right! 

Last Wednesday, as SAP Gold Partner, AGENTIL was glad to be presented as one of the main partners of the SAP Live Campus event, which took place in Geneva. The event lasted a whole day and was filled with amazing lectures, conferences and workshops.

After a quick coffee, the participants were warmly welcomed by Michael Locher-Tjoa, the Managing Director of SAP Switzerland. He introduced our CEO through a little video (watch here), in which Jean-François Lauri presented AGENTIL as an innovative and ahead-of-its time company.

During the workshops and lectures, six members of our team animated the AGENTIL booth to meet with clients, partners and potential customers by presenting all of the SAP solutions and services AGENTIL has to offer. It also gave the team the opportunity to promote the SoH Swiss, a current crowdfunding project in collaboration with Red Hat.

After a nice lunch break, Jean-François Lauri and Christophe Imbach, IT Director of Sunstar in Europe, held a conference on the first implementation project of S/4HANA Cloud in Switzerland.

This lecture allowed the assistance to have a better understanding of how AGENTIL had managed to revamp Sunstar’s outdated system by using SAP’s S/4HANA and C/4HANA: AGENTIL’s goals were to reduce the complexity of Sunstar’s existing processes, while operating a digital transformation and increasing its business efficiency, making Sunstar a much more agile company.

Working hand in hand, AGENTIL, SAP and Sunstar hope for a successful delivery of the completed project by 2020… and right now, they’re off to a pretty good start! To learn more about this project, you can look up our presentation here: https://agn.tl/S4HANACloud

Following the AGENTIL lecture, Nils Müller, the Special Guest of this years edition made an appearance, offering a journey to the Year 2028 with Dr Futura. While traveling ‘back to the future’, he presented existing micro-trends and technologies that could heavily impact our lives in the future.

To finish off this intense day of knowledge-sharing, all of the guests headed to the famous Brasserie des Halles de l’Île, posted on the Rhône, on a little urban island, for some drinks and a musical night with the singer and songwriter, Nickless.

If you haven’t been able to attend this year’s SAP Live Campus to meet with our AGENTIL team members and would like to learn more about how we can transform your company, contact us today!

We are proud to announce our new partnership with SAP, we now provide SAP S/4HANA Cloud: the intelligent Cloud ERP to accelerate digital value creation.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud makes ERP Intelligent by delivering predictive analytics, machine learning, and digital assistance to accelerate decisions, improve efficiency and empower users.

It helps organizations manage a rapid pace of change, ensuring access to the latest technologies and delivering instant value, while providing the agility and flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions. 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can grow and adapt to an organization’s changing needs, delivering modern capabilities to enable differentiation and long-term impact.

AGENTIL Group supports the Genevan association Hôpiclowns. We invite you to take note of its generously supportive mission, acknowledged in public utility, with suffering people (children, adults and seniors) who are staying in hospital or in an institution.

Hôpiclowns includes 7 women and 7 men who are professional clowns and work in hospitals and specialized institutions in the canton of Geneva. Their aim is to offer a little joy, dream, laugh and play, emotion and support to suffering people whose stay away from home can be experienced in sadness or even anxiety. They work in interaction with caregivers.

Hôpiclowns : the “disease” in brackets!

What if you also made a donation? Click here!

AGENTIL is proud to be a Gold Partner of this year's SAP Customer Experience Day, which will take place on a boat, departing from Lausanne, and taking you figuratively and quite literally, on a journey.

The goal of this SAP CX Day is for all participants to experience the fourth generation CRM Technology suite with SAP C/4 HANA.

What is it? SAP C/4 HANA is a CRM which unlocks a world of digital innovation, customer value and growth that builds trusted relationships between brands and customers and helps to manage the complete customer experience. (Source)

Our AGENTIL team members will be joining the event and presenting our expertise through a customer success story, regarding the implementation of the C/4 HANA CRM for one of our biggest clients. We will then be more than glad to answer any questions you might have and discuss how C/4 HANA can help you to seamlessly guide the customer journey from start to finish on a single platform through a new world of digital innovation. (Source)

When? 19th of September 2019, from 1:00pm to 6:00pm. The agenda is available here.

Where? The boat will depart from Lausanne-Ouchy, Quai Jean-Pascal Delamuraz 1, 1006 Lausanne 6.

Join our AGENTIL SME / SMB team for a « Discovery Breakfast »: this event is open to everyone, whether they are our customers or those who simply want to discover what SAP Business One is all about.

When? The Discovery Breakfast will take place on September 19, 2019

What time? From 8:00am to 12:00pm

Where? At our Geneva HQ: AGENTIL, Rue du Pré-de-la-Fontaine 19, 1242 Satigny

Register now

THE THEMES

• What's new in SAP Business One

Discover all of the new features of the latest SAP Business One version presented by our experts.

• Mobility with SAP Business One

Test our mobile applications for smartphones and tablets live and independently: Sales Mobile App and Service Mobile App.

• Analytical and reporting capabilities

What is SAP Analytics Cloud? What are the differences between SAP Business One SQL and SAP Business One HANA? Our team answers your questions to guide you in your analytical performance.

• Other needs, other solutions

Do you think a cloud solution is better suited to your needs? Do you need advice on your logistics and production management?

IF YOU ARE NOT A SAP BUSINESS ONE CUSTOMER

• What is the purpose of an ERP?

Discover all the features of the latest SAP Business One version presented by our experts.

• Test SAP Business One live

We provide you with demonstration spaces on PCs, smartphones and tablets so that you can navigate through the software and simulate your company's own processes.

• Need to evaluate your situation? 

Do you need advice on your business management? Benefit from a free mini audit of your current IT system and management tools with a consultant.

Talk directly with an expert about your issues and discover how AGENTIL can support you in your development.

To register for the event, click here. 

Discover, try and share. 

AGENTIL has decided to start a series of collective trainings regarding your ERP, SAP Business One. You will learn to make better use of your software, (re)discover its functionalities, share your user experience and deal with you personal issues. 

That’s the concept behind AGENTIL Academy's Trainings.

A team of experts will be available during a whole day to train you and teach you key points to use your ERP. 

Our second workshop will take place on June 20th, 2019 at our Geneva HQ and the subject will be Control and optimize your supply and logistics processes with SAP Business One. 

Please note that the event will be exclusively held in French.

____________________________________________________________________

The content:

• Purchasing management - Optimize the purchasing cycle to increase margins

Master data management, procurement, MRP, accounting and reporting.

• Inventory management - Inventory allocation and control

Warehouse and inventory management, warehouse area management, goods receipt and issue control (pick & pack), alerts, reporting.

Master SAP Business One functionalities in purchasing, inventory and finance and adopt best-practices to improve your internal processes.

The training will be based on practical exercices on the demonstration environment developed especially for the training.

AGENTIL, and Scality are hosting the first ever collaborative event to present the future of flexible data storage. You are invited to learn more about software-defined object storage and how it could benefit your company.

Nowadays, organizations are looking for solid, easy-to-deploy storage that can keep up with growing data needs. 

Scality is ideal for customers who want a highly durable and accessible storage solution for their fast-growing data. With pre-validated designs that are proven to deliver high ROI, the solution is simple to order, deploy, and manage. Its architectural flexibility provides high-performance, scalable capacity for data-intensive use cases.  

_____________________________________

JOIN OUR EVENT

When? June 14th, 2019 from 8:30 am to 12:30 pm

Where? Four Seasons, Hotel des Bergues, Geneva

_____________________________________

AGENDA

8:30 am • Welcome & Coffee 

- Why is Object Storage interesting to you now? 

- Customer Testimonial: EPFL success story with Scality 

- Scality Scale Out Storage & Multi-Cloud Solution: Overview and Demo 

- Key Use Cases of the Scality Solution

- Added Value of Cisco UCS & Scality Architecture

12:30 pm • Lunch & Networking 

_____________________________________

About Scality

The Scality offering delivers a modern, best-in-class solution that overcomes the limitations of traditional storage to provide high-performance, scalable capacity for data-intensive use cases.

Two days for gathering information, meeting market providers and boosting your business!

Join AGENTIL at the LEC event during which you can attend conferences, meet experts, network and boost your company. Come meet our teams on April 9th and 10th at Geneva’s Palexpo !

Also, on April 9th, from 3:15pm to 4:00pm, Stig Wikberg (AGENTIL’s co-director) will be contributing to Sunstar’s conference regarding our implementation of SAP C/4HANA, alongside Christophe Imbach. You can learn more about this here.

To win your entrance to the event*, email us at marketing@agentil.com with the following details: first name, last name and company name.

*First come, first served, according to the number of available entrances.

Conferences will be held during the event on the following themes:

• BI, Big Data & AI
• Cloud
• eCommerce & Digital Marketing
• Modern selling
• Cybersecurity
• Business Software
• Digital workplace
• FM Tech

It’s the essential event for directors and decision-makers! Learn more about the event by visiting the LEC page.

When it comes to data centres, we sometimes fail to comprehend the importance of applications. This can lead us to neglect their protection when, in fact, they are a key element in driving business value.

Cisco, being fully aware of applications’ relevancy, created Tetration: a holistic workload protection for multicloud data centers. With its zero-trust model, Tetration will help you to quickly identify security incidents, contain lateral movement and reduce your attack surface.

At AGENTIL, we are very glad to be Cisco Partners and to be able to promote Tetration. We are also capable to endorse its capacity to protect both applications and servers through zero trust security policies.

Obviously, proof of a product’s efficiency should always come with a demonstration. On March 6th and 7th, Cisco and AGENTIL will be more than pleased to welcome you to the Workload Protection: Make The Invisible Visible workshop.

Two dates to attend the event:

• March 6th, 2019 at Cisco Systems, in Rolle
• March 7th, 2019 at the Hôtel des Bergues, in Geneva

For more information, feel free to contact Christophe Desperrier at christophe.desperrier@agentil.com

Discover, try and share. 

AGENTIL has decided to start a series of collective trainings regarding your ERP, SAP Business One. You will learn to make better use of your software, (re)discover its functionalities, share your user experience and deal with you personal issues. 

That’s the concept behind AGENTIL’s Training Thursdays. 

A team of experts will be available during a whole day to train you and teach you key points to use your ERP. 

The first workshop will take place on March 14th, 2019 at our Geneva HQ and the subject will be Making use of your financial data.

Please note that the event will be exclusively held in French.

The agenda :

• Welcome breakfast at 9:00am, with coffee and croissants.
• Morning: budgetary accounting with Daniel Nguyen.
• Lunch break: buffet lunch and discussions
• Afternoon: cost accounting with Patrick Stoeckli
• The event will end at approximately 5:00pm

To launch this event, we ask for a 300.-CHF participation fee per person. 

Yesterday night, like every single year since 2006, we planned a corporate event in our Geneva HQ to celebrate the holidays with our team members and their kids.

A little cocktail was catered and we had a few drinks (non alcoholic, of course) and some festive snacks.

But that’s not all! The whole office was rearranged: desks were moved, Ethernet cables were unplugged, a Christmas tree and ornaments were installed… Our marketing team had brilliantly planned multiple games for the children, such as a race track with our Mini Tesla (too cute!), Nerf games and magic tricks! The least we can say is, the kids had fun… and so did the adults! 

Of course, Santa paid us an early visit and brought some gifts for each and every child present that day. This tradition is and always will be, close to our hearts. It creates lovely memories between our team members and their families, which is something we would love to perpetuate throughout the years. 

We have always prided ourselves in being an SAP Partner… and we’re even more proud to say that we’re still going on strong!

We have been recently notified that AGENTIL support center meets all SAP’s quality standards required for an automatic recertification of our Partner Center Of Expertise (PCoE) status.  

What does this mean for us?
AGENTIL is the first SAP Partner in French-speaking Switzerland to receive the automatic extension of our SAP Partner COE certification for two additional years, instead of going through the full SAP audit process. 

This means that the prerequisites for the recertification continuously measured by SAP (including the certifications and trainings of our consultants) upheld all SAP’s satisfaction to keep the AGENTIL support center certified as Partner Center Of Expertise without further reassessment.

What does this mean for our clients?
The PCoE status means that our maintenance clients can continue to trust the AGENTIL experts to maintain and support their SAP systems on the high level implied by SAP PCoE certification, with the best care and the best customer service. Our clients’ satisfaction is our priority and we intend to keep it that way!

Want to know more?
For more information regarding our certifications and partnerships, we recommend that you chat with us at info@agentil.com or click on the contact button, on your right!

Looking back at all the amazing exchanges we had during the past few days at the SAP TechEd event in Barcelona, we feel like participants are looking for more than typical innovations, as there is a real need for solutions which will help them manage the upcoming tidal waves.

Most of the company representatives we met had already made their choice : the SAP monitoring is done internally or outsourced. But, in both cases and based on the conversations we had with the service providers as well, there seems to be a lack of instrumentation. 

Even if it's a simple environment containing one landscape or the typical ones with ten to twenty or major companies with several hundreds, or even thousands of systems, we found optimisations that could, from day one, save several minutes per system and per day! My advice? Stop trying to make out how much you would save if you optimized your monitoring by, say, ten minutes per system per day. You would truly be horrified!

What an incredible resonance for our ServiceNow story! Nearly one out of two passer-by at our booth mentioned this topic. If only every SAP-ServiceNow company knew what we have built for ServiceNow between SolMan and ITOM, they would surely want to implement it in a heartbeat. And I’m pretty certain it’s the beginning of a love story between these two solutions...

Finally, this was the ideal stage to validate our focuses for FY19, and we can confirm that we really are at the right place, at the right time. A security audit report is key (you will hear about it in the future), as our agnostic approach which allows integration is welcome in this established market. We can see many possible collaborations with existing or future customers to enhance even more our solution.

Thank you and see you next year, SAP TechEd!

Want to learn more about how we can optimize the monitoring of your SAP systems? Contact us today!

What SAP TechEd taught us, in a nutshell :
- optimization > innovation,
- 60+ conversations which concluded with a primary demo (we nearly burned our demo man),
- concrete cases with 6-7 figure savings,
- the future of SAP will be combined with SNow,
- validation of our stories in our backlog.

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

Events and fairs are a whirlwind, honestly. They demand a lot of time and energy, whether you’re on the fair comity or marketing team, but if done correctly, they can be very rewarding. Most importantly, they’re the best opportunity to showcase your expertise to a select crowd which most likely shares the same interests as you. 

Last year, the AGENTIL team already participated in the Salon Progiciels in Annecy - which is a fair dedicated to innovative software packages and performance enhancements - and they got to live a great experience, running a booth, meeting prospects and future clients. Proof that this was a beneficial experience was… we decided to participate this year as well! 

On October 11th, in the early time of day, the AGENTIL France team (Christophe Dantin, Maxime Gandy and Carole Lacroix, from AGENTIL Media) headed to the event’s location to add the finishing touches to the booth and have a little team meeting going through the program one last time, before heading to the welcome party. 

The event’s theme was The performance equation: agility + digital + lean, which indicates that the aim of this fair was to have business owners confronted to the fact that companies need to be much more agile and turn towards Lean. Indeed, this new era of the digital industry needs for companies to adjust, in order to achieve higher performances levels and stay on top of the market.

The AGENTIL France team was present to demonstrate our expertise as ERP integrator (SAP Business One, SAP Business ByDesign and SAP S/4HANA) and got to meet potential customers all day long. 

Multiple workshops and conferences were available for visitors and Christophe Dantin hosted a workshop on How to manage your company to gain productivity? He demonstrated that ERP systems are the way to go to if you wish to grow a modern business, relying on a reliable system to host and gather your company’s information, boost and improve your productivity. 

Indeed, ERP softwares have come a long way since their first appearance in the industrial world in the 90's. If they use to be a way for manufacturers to improve the inventory management and supply/demand issues back then, they can now be useful for any type of company, big or small, to ease the internal processes. At AGENTIL, we believe each business is unique and, therefore, should have a unique system to work with. That's why we offer modular ERP systems so that employees can work only with the specific modules they actually need, increasing their productivity and the company's safety.

If you wish to discover which ERP would help your company transition into the digital era, don’t hesitate to have a chat with one of our experts!

On October 3rd and 4th, AGENTIL was very glad to participate in the HR fair (called Salon RH in French) in Geneva.

The goal of this event was to create a meeting point for all HR professionals, offering a global vision of the market on all innovative human resources products and services.  During two days, it was reported that more than 2500 visitors came to the HR fair to see the 160 exhibitors and assist to one of the 130 conferences.

AGENTIL was delighted to run a booth with a few members of the team and Roger Haenggi, from IBM, to meet the public and present its very own innovative solutions. 

Jean-François Lauri, CEO of AGENTIL Group, held a conference regarding digital collaboration and new ways to work. Indeed, digital transformation changes the way people work together by ruffling up the classic work dynamics we all know and offering employees new ways to be efficient in their daily tasks and team projects. If the idea of making an employee more efficient during his/her working hours can mainly be seen as a productivity issue for the company, it should mostly be considered as beneficial for the employees’ motivation. Getting to your goals quicker and in a more efficient way, spending less time responding to emails, not struggling to find corporate resources anymore, not waiting around for a colleague’s response to get the document you urgently need to finish a task… all of these (big) little things can greatly improve the way you feel about your work at the end of the day. Truly, it can increase morale more than you would think.  During his conference, Jean-François Lauri presented the latest fully customizable community work solution, called IBM Connections.

At AGENTIL, we are able to customize this collaborative work solution with your company’s visual identity to make it feel like ‘home’ and make your use out of it that much more enjoyable. If you wish to learn more about what IBM connections can transform the way your teams work, communicate and manage projects, contact us to start your very own digital transformation!

Last Wednesday, as SAP Gold Partner, AGENTIL was glad to be presented as one of the main partners of the SAP Live Campus event, which took place in Geneva. The event lasted a whole day and was filled with amazing lectures, conferences and workshops.

After a quick coffee, the participants were warmly welcomed by Michael Locher-Tjoa, the Managing Director of SAP Switzerland. He introduced our CEO through a little video (watch here), in which Jean-François Lauri presented AGENTIL as an innovative and ahead-of-its time company.

During the workshops and lectures, six members of our team animated the AGENTIL booth to meet with clients, partners and potential customers by presenting all of the SAP solutions and services AGENTIL has to offer. It also gave the team the opportunity to promote the SoH Swiss, a current crowdfunding project in collaboration with Red Hat.

After a nice lunch break, Jean-François Lauri and Christophe Imbach, IT Director of Sunstar in Europe, held a conference on the first implementation project of S/4HANA Cloud in Switzerland.

This lecture allowed the assistance to have a better understanding of how AGENTIL had managed to revamp Sunstar’s outdated system by using SAP’s S/4HANA and C/4HANA: AGENTIL’s goals were to reduce the complexity of Sunstar’s existing processes, while operating a digital transformation and increasing its business efficiency, making Sunstar a much more agile company.

Working hand in hand, AGENTIL, SAP and Sunstar hope for a successful delivery of the completed project by 2020… and right now, they’re off to a pretty good start! To learn more about this project, you can look up our presentation here: https://agn.tl/S4HANACloud

Following the AGENTIL lecture, Nils Müller, the Special Guest of this years edition made an appearance, offering a journey to the Year 2028 with Dr Futura. While traveling ‘back to the future’, he presented existing micro-trends and technologies that could heavily impact our lives in the future.

To finish off this intense day of knowledge-sharing, all of the guests headed to the famous Brasserie des Halles de l’Île, posted on the Rhône, on a little urban island, for some drinks and a musical night with the singer and songwriter, Nickless.

If you haven’t been able to attend this year’s SAP Live Campus to meet with our AGENTIL team members and would like to learn more about how we can transform your company, contact us today!

As the AGENTIL entities around the world continue to thrive and expand after being in business for more than twelve years, Jean-François Lauri, founder and CEO of AGENTIL Group has decided to bring a new member to the team to help him conduct the company through its growth. A co-pilot, in a sense. Therefore, we will have the pleasure to greet Stig Wikberg as co-leader of the Group starting February 1st.

From physics to IT

Although Stig is originally from Norway, he spent the majority of his life in Switzerland and studied physics at the EPFL in Lausanne.

If the connection between physics and information technologies isn’t quite obvious just yet, it sure makes sense when you learn more about how Stig ended up working for IBM for ten years.

As soon as he got his degree, he decided not to pursue a career in that field. Luckily enough, big IT companies were looking to hire young people who had a physics degree because these studies were considered quite broad and mind-opening.

He then got two job offers, one from IBM and one from SAP. He took IBM’s offer in the blink of an eye, as it seemed more appealing and included a crash-course in sales in Paris.

A decade at IBM and two decades at SAP

During his decade at IBM, Stig held various positions, such as head of International Organizations, development director of SAP activities at IBM, head of a major account…

When he felt like he had explored all of his options at IBM, he decided he needed a change and ended up working for SAP as head of the French-speaking Switzerland branch of the company.

The SAP office of the French-speaking Switzerland was about the size of AGENTIL today (about seventy people) and Stig enjoyed the flexibility and freedom that came with the job. It meant he could make decisions for this branch of the company without having to suffer from the complex administrative processes that these big companies usually enforce. And his office’s success was proof enough that everything was working out for the best.

On an amusing note, he met Jean-François Lauri back then, who was working for HP at the time.

While he thoroughly enjoyed his work as head of the office, he didn’t like as much becoming general manager for consumer industries afterwards. He was still getting great results from his work, but he found himself missing some kind of spark and went back to a position in sales (specifically, to sell S/4HANA Cloud), which he found to be very interesting. However, after twenty years, it was time for a change.

A new start at AGENTIL

When Stig was offered by Jean-François to become co-leader of the AGENTIL Group, he found it to be a great opportunity. Of course, his experience in the IT department and particularly in the SAP world are going to be invaluable, but he very much likes to focus on the human and social aspects of AGENTIL’s development. What he thought lacked in his later experiences, he wishes to reinforce here. He definitely identifies with AGENTIL’s human values, such as trust, hard work, communication and being a sustainable company.

Also, one of Stig’s main focus is to help AGENTIL and its clients transition where the future lies, into the Cloud. Although Jean-François Lauri had already taken the decision to go forward with this transformation in the company, it’s a long but rewarding change that should further ensure AGENTIL Group’s customers’ success, as well as its own.  

Finally, to welcome Stig properly, we would like to leave you on two of his favorite quotes from Richard Branson, which perfectly illustrate what he would like to achieve at AGENTIL :

« If you look after your staff well, they will look after your customers. Simple. »

« Train people well so that they can leave, treat them well enough so they don’t. »

On October 2nd, the AGENTIL team participated in a very coveted conference in Geneva organized by Impact IA, called « Artificial Intelligence: towards a nomadic form of Work? ». Indeed, AGENTIL Group chose to sponsor a particular workshop during the event: « Woman in the Loop ». What was it all about? 

As a representative of women in tech and our very own innovation specialist, Sarah Bouhnick was asked to be a participant during the workshop. During the preparation phase before the actual event, the conversation rose in the AGENTIL Geneva offices about what being a « Woman in the Loop » actually meant.

Two major points were debated: 

• the clear under-representation of women in the tech world, 
• the place of the ‘feminine’ part in the process of human represented forms of AI.

This debate pointed back to Sarah’s exchange with Andre Guillen, marketing director of the Impact IA Foundation, as he interviewed her regarding Artificial Intelligence and a woman’s place in this still very masculine industry. 
You can watch Sarah's interview here.

For the workshop and conference, the AGENTIL team gathered a few members, including Sarah (of course), Jean-François Pietri (Transition Manager and Senior Consultant) and Carole Lacroix, head of the marketing department of AGENTIL Media. 

As the event began, experts, journalists and Laura Tocmacov Venchiarutti - Impact IA’s Managing Director - asked Sarah to join the press briefing, so that they get to the core of this event’s topic. They were joined by another one of the event’s sponsors, Visium, that debated on « Innovation and Entrepreneurship ».

A few minutes from the beginning of the press briefing, a journalist from the AGEFI newspaper asked Sarah «Why ‘Woman in the Loop’? Why this specific topic? » And the answer was quite simple: women need to take part in modeling the future and a part of this discussion. 

The briefing was neatly organized in little groups of twenty AI experts and journalists, discussing all subjects of the event’s conferences. As it ended, the public entered the event and took place into little workshops to contribute to the brainstorming of these same topics. 

« What exactly is Artificial Intelligence? » a woman asked. And the truth is, it’s a hard definition to give. « I believe that Artificial Intelligence doesn’t really exist yet. We’re more about intelligence of artificial things, if I can say so. That’s why I think we need to bring more women to the table and offer a different vision of this topic » Sarah answered. 

The debate continued with plenty of great arguments:

« I like the idea of a new societal organization, we need to re-think the word ‘relationship’ today, as the definition just might be transformed with and through technology. » 

« What if we didn’t need to work anymore? » - « But human beings will want to work in order to still have some sense of a social status and place in society » 

« What if it were a new society model? » - « Sure, but society is afraid of new ways of thinking. » 

As the debate went on, Sarah’s conclusions were that a woman’s place in the IT world isn’t really the subject. It’s more about redefining what is today’s reality but could be completely redefined tomorrow. But some questions remain unanswered for now: do we really need to add gender to the conversation, apart if it’s to push equality into our new societal constructions? Are we going to continue giving human characteristics to the technological lives we create? Will Artificial Intelligence always be influenced by humans, or can it become independent at some point? 

If you wish to discover AGENTIL's progress on AI solutions, come chat with us through the contact button on your right! 

We are proud to announce our new partnership with SAP, we now provide SAP S/4HANA Cloud: the intelligent Cloud ERP to accelerate digital value creation.

SAP S/4HANA Cloud makes ERP Intelligent by delivering predictive analytics, machine learning, and digital assistance to accelerate decisions, improve efficiency and empower users.

It helps organizations manage a rapid pace of change, ensuring access to the latest technologies and delivering instant value, while providing the agility and flexibility to adapt to changing business conditions. 

SAP S/4HANA Cloud can grow and adapt to an organization’s changing needs, delivering modern capabilities to enable differentiation and long-term impact.

AGENTIL Group supports the Genevan association Hôpiclowns. We invite you to take note of its generously supportive mission, acknowledged in public utility, with suffering people (children, adults and seniors) who are staying in hospital or in an institution.

Hôpiclowns includes 7 women and 7 men who are professional clowns and work in hospitals and specialized institutions in the canton of Geneva. Their aim is to offer a little joy, dream, laugh and play, emotion and support to suffering people whose stay away from home can be experienced in sadness or even anxiety. They work in interaction with caregivers.

Hôpiclowns : the “disease” in brackets!

What if you also made a donation? Click here!

This year, AGENTIL was present at the professional fair of the UNEP (National Union of Landscaping Companies) and, after exchanging with many landscape gardeners, we have realized that only a few of them were using new technologies to manage their companies. 

However, from managing stocks and materials to automating quotes, and handling projects… construction companies aren’t short on solutions to digitize some daily tasks. 

In order to support our claims, here are a few numbers found in an article from KPMG, that confirm the observations we made during the fair. 

Integrating it in the company’s strategy? 

Construction companies are slowly but surely realizing the importance of technological innovations in their industry. Proof of that is that, when asked, 78% of company owners are conscious that digitalization is going to be a big part of their work. 

Business owners’ intentions go along with digitalization

But the assessment is quite clear: only a small amount of companies are fully equipped with adequate technologies! 

« 62% of construction companies still work with reporting systems that require a manual intervention from one of their co-workers » says KPMG 

Integrated systems, capable of exploiting the generated data, are present in only 8% of companies… 

We think that this low rate of « equipment » in the construction industry comes from the gap between the work itself and the digital world. A lack of time and maybe of interest for these new technologies would explain the hesitations that some owners would have to jump the gun. However, this step is crucial to ensure the durability and development of the company! 

If you’re still with us, we would like you to know that AGENTIL integrates management and mobility solutions, perfectly adjusted to very small businesses and SMBs in the construction industry. To learn more about what we can do for you, contact us or browse our Solutions' catalog.

When flying, pilots need to have all the right information right away. They rely on a technical team to do the maintenance, ensure the services but still keep an eye on the most relevant metrics. Why should it be different with SAP, probably one of your most critical IT system?

Sure, no lives are directly in play but isn’t the performance of your SAP systems impacting your business? Probably even in a critical way! And isn’t there any metric, apart from the standard technical ones, which a relevant for you to pilot your ERP?

When we regroup with SAP companies about their ERP monitoring, two cases stand out: either they have an internal basis team (maybe complemented with some externals) in charge of the technical support of their systems or they fully outsource this task to a service provider. This is probably very similar to the flight industry: either they have an external service provider or the service is done by their own teams. But in both cases, you probably know that the pilot (or the co-pilot) does a visual check before every flight and the crew has all kinds of indicators about the engines in the cockpit.

Do they only trust a static report per day, summarizing all events from the last 24 hours? Do they pretend they don’t care because someone else is in charge?

In the flight industry, this kind of attitude would seem completely crazy but the ERP world, it looks like the norm! SAP pilots are driving nearly blind (or in a reactive way) and rely mostly on technical checks done by someone else. What you won’t accept even for your own car (you still have “qualified metrics” all the time in front of the driver) is common in the IT world.

At AGENTIL, we believe SAP pilots should have a full and qualified view on the systems they are responsible for everyday, every second. This is how and why we designed the Pro.Monitor solution. Pro.Monitor concentrates years of SAP management experience and can be fine tuned by your SAP Basis specialists but, first and foremost, it provides relevant metrics within the SAP Cockpit. Data are where it makes sense (in the cockpit and not only in a daily static report) and can be consumed on the fly.

SAP Basis specialists can focus on the added value tasks with the confidence they will get alerts as soon as the pro-active threshold are reached. SAP Pilots (SAP Program managers, SAP CC managers, CIO’s) can have a graphical view on the system’s health, which includes technical but also business (security, logistic, finance, …) metrics.

And the data are where they will be consumed (within the service management platform like ServiceNow or aggregated to the general IT monitoring) to ensure a complete view with a single pair of glasses and, at the same time, avoid manual data transmission. Alerting is efficient. Problem solving is including automatically all important information.

If you wish to learn more about our solution, head to www.agentil-software.com and request your test drive today!

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

Many companies outsource their SAP Landscape or, at the very least, its management.

Having a specialized partner makes sense: it means that, due to scaling effects, you can keep the best experts while the in-house teams can concentrate on running projects. But does this mean companies should be handing over all control over their own systems?

I can't even count the number of times I've heard of companies getting just one PDF report per day. Only one PDF report per day to assess the health of some of their most critical systems... I can't even count the number of times I've also seen companies get a 24/7 monitoring on hardware, network and else... but only one single report per day for their SAP environments.

We recently implemented our solution in a company which was in the process of outsourcing their whole SAP landscape. Our Pro.Monitor solution is their single pane of glass. Both the end customer and the service provider/outsourcer have the same view on the system. There are no discussions or subjective feelings regarding performance or reaction, and SLA is measured automatically with the integration into ServiceNow.

In light of that, AGENTIL Software has created Pro.Monitor to help you keep a trustful relationship with your partner and to keep an eye on your functional metrics, therefore avoiding any kind of argument in case of an issue. If you wish to know more about SAP Cockpit, our Pro.Monitor solution or our integrations between SAP Solution Manager (SolMan) and ServiceNow, visit our website!

This article was written by Julian Senn, Software Business Manager at AGENTIL Group

Social networks have never had such a significant place and impact in our daily routines as today. Even if they started out as a way to connect people in their personal lives, they’ve slowly but surely made their way into the workplace. 

Nowadays, collaborative work tools act the same way as social networks do : you can post updates, pictures, videos, use instant messaging, create groups... And there is no denying that these tools greatly facilitate the process of a group task. At AGENTIL, we make use of collaborative work solutions on the daily!

In 2007, IBM decided to jump on the bandwagon and started developing their very own collaborative work environment, called IBM Connections. This product is a team collaborative platform that helps employees become much more efficient and invested in their work projects. Plus, at AGENTIL, IBM Connections can be fully customized.

IBM Connections’ interface recalls the world’s most used social network and, with that being said, it’s a great advantage: it’s user-friendly and intuitive, therefore requiring absolutely no training support. 

The scenario is quite simple: anyone can create a community and invite their coworkers or even their customers to participate to the project, and share files, customer briefs and more. Having all ressources for a specific project stored at the same place is a real time-saver. Forget emails asking John where the presentation for your latest customer has been filed and waiting twenty minutes before having it sent to you!

Furthermore, you can choose to add competence tags to your employees, colleagues and self, helping you find the best person to carry out a task regarding a specific project. IBM Connections also has integrated social traces of knowledge, which would, for example, give you access to a former colleague's knowledge base as training.

All of these carefully crafted features ensure interactions are simplified and work processes are substantially improved. The forum sections allow all members of a same team to have focused conversations, accessible at all times, helping employees improve their effectiveness on the job. And this idea is reinforced by statistics showing that the use of a collaborative work tool such as IBM Connections can cut off 30% of email traffic.

At AGENTIL, we truly believe in time-saving solutions such as IBM Connections and can only vouch for their efficiency and convenience. However, we also think that a collaborative work tool should convey your company’s aesthetic and now offer to not only implement Connections in your workplace, but have it fully customized to your image and needs. 

During the HR Event in Geneva, the AGENTIL team was running a booth in partnership with IBM, presenting their innovative solutions. For this occasion, AGENTIL’s CEO, Jean-François Lauri also held a conference and was proud to demonstrate the customized interface of IBM Connections.

If you are interested in discovering all of the advantages of using IBM Connections and have it customized to your convenience, don't hesitate to contact us!

_

Check out references for IBM connections :

The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2016: Shifting to Work and Outcomes (1) named IBM a leader in its evaluation of enterprise social network providers for the 4th consecutive year, citing IBM’s global presence, predictive analytics capabilities and growing partner ecosystem. 

The Constellation ShortList™ for Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites with Project Features (2) has recognized IBM Connections Activities for its combination of collaboration, social networking and project management capabilities.

 The Forrester Wave™: File Sync and Share Platforms: Cloud Solutions, Q1 2016 (3) named IBM a leader, citing the broad collaboration, file sharing and social analytics capabilities of IBM Connections Cloud. 

The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Hybrid Solutions, Q2 2016 (4) cited IBM as a leader among the ten most significant providers of enterprise file sync and share (EFSS) solutions with hybrid or on-premises deployment options.  

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace (5) named IBM a leader for the 7th year in a row, recognized for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute.

IDC's Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks, Online Communities, and Innovation Management Market Shares, 2015: Innovation at Scale (6) shows IBM has maintained its #1 position in Core Enterprise Social Networks for the 7th consecutive year.

The Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise Social Networking Product 2016-17 (7) named IBM a Leader in its latest examination of the enterprise social networking landscape. 

1. The Aragon Research Globe™ for Social Software, 2016: Shifting to Work and Outcomes, Sept 23, 2016
2. Constellation ShortList™ for Social Task Management: Enterprise Suites with Project Features, October 2016
3. The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Cloud Solutions, Q1 2016
4. The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise File Sync And Share Platforms, Hybrid Solutions, Q2 2016
5. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace, October 26, 2015. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
6. Worldwide Enterprise Social Networks, Online Communities and Innovation Management Market Shares, 2015:Innovation at Scale, August 2016, IDC #US41576016
7. Ovum Decision Matrix: Selecting an Enterprise Social Networking Product 2016-17, October 27 2016