2020 summary – how did we face the pandemic
Probably none of us a year ago predicted events to unfold in this way over the coming 12 months.
From the first months of 2020 we have already heard about the COVID-19 pandemic coming to Europe and later also to Poland. However, it was hard to imagine that due to the introduced restrictions and security procedures, within a few days we would turn our homes into workplaces and see our teammates only “virtually”.
Effective organisation of work during an epidemic
Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we know that we can work effectively also in such conditions. Remote work tools, which were used much less frequently before the pandemic, have become commonplace. Our customers, who previously very often expected only on-site projects, trusted us and in this difficult time we continued to work together on projects in the new reality. Business trips have ceased and all communication with the client has moved to the virtual world. All project tasks, both those to be completed on the Contractor’s side and on the Customer’s side, were described in Jira, meetings were usually held with the support of a virtual platform, and signatures on project meeting notes were collected using an in-house IT system.
Thanks to all these procedures and introduced tools, implementations of solutions for Customers could be carried out without any disturbances, and each task or note was documented in shared project resources.
The past year has confirmed that the understanding between the Contractor and the Client with the common goal of always completing the project on time leads to success.
Product development with e-services
A keen observation of the surrounding in a pandemic reality also influenced the directions of development of our own solutions (PROLIB, QUATRA Max) and the construction of supplements for products of global manufacturers. New applications were created, such as BOOKINGPLACE, as well as additional functionalities in existing products (e. g. The main advantages of this solution are: support for several online payment services, remote scan ordering, remote rental with integration with InPost parcel machines, automation of invoice processing, OCR, employee portals, mobile solutions and solutions to improve work in e-commerce), which in the face of remote work and existing limitations have become very desirable and necessary for effective work.
Cloud competences are worth their weight in gold!
The experience of 2020 has also confirmed that the previously chosen directions of competence development in Cloud services are correct. The current situation has significantly strengthened interest in such solutions. Thanks to unique references from previous implementations, during the discussed period we implemented several large projects based on Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications. In order to improve and automate the implementation of processes we have also built our own extensions to support the Polish localization for Oracle Fusion ERP using Oracle PaaS and Oracle IaaS tools. Thanks to the experience gained, our employees have completed numerous certificates, which clearly confirms the ever-increasing competence of the team in Cloud technologies from global manufacturers.
In the area of solutions supporting the activities of libraries, as a result of previous experience in this area with our own product PROLIB, knowledge and high competence, we signed an agreement on cooperation in the area of solutions for libraries in the Cloud (agreement with EBSCO concerning FOLIO), which in this difficult situation also turned out to be exceptionally expected by the market.
To sum up: 2020 is a time of huge changes. The ability to adapt quickly to new conditions and the trust placed in us by our customers allowed us to close the 2020 financial year, which ended on 30 September 2020, at a net profit of over 10%, which, especially in this unusual period, is a very good result.
We would like to thank our Customers, Business Partners and Employees for effective cooperation in these special conditions. It is only because of you that we were able to achieve such results in fiscal 2020.
We all wonder what 2021 might surprise us with. It will definitely bring us more challenges. Our Company will continue to develop its own products in order to more effectively implement and automate the change processes of our Clients in the area of management support systems (ERP, BI, Workflow, RPA), HR and payroll systems and library management systems. We believe that with good cooperation and mutual trust each completed implementation will bring benefits to the users of our solutions.
Happy New Year 2021!
Management Board of Sygnity Business Solutions S. A.
