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From the Old West to the New Wild West of Enterprise Mobility

alba — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 07:53:50 +0000

There was a time when working meant, above all else, hitting the road. In the Old West, traversing boundless geographical distances was part of daily life for merchants, coachmen, ranchers, and couriers. People travelled to make purchases, deliver goods, strike deals, or simply carry important information. Back then, distances were massive and travel was complex; a substantial portion of the workday was spent, quite simply, in the effort of getting where one needed to go.

Today, we live in a radically different ecosystem. Yet, looking closely, core business needs haven’t changed: we still move people, goods, and data to drive growth. What has changed dramatically is everything that happens while we are on the move.

The Journey That Transformed the Concept of Work

In the 19th century, setting off on a journey meant accepting an inevitable compromise: leaving something behind. Leaving meant disconnecting from the physical workplace, from company records, and from colleagues. With communication bound to the speed of a horse or a steam locomotive, a strategic decision could take days, if not weeks, to reach its intended recipient.

Subsequent technological progress triggered a gradual contraction of time and space. Trains shortened distances, automobiles introduced the flexibility of individual travel, telephones uncoupled conversations from physical presence, and the internet finally enabled information to travel at the speed of light.

This brings us to a modern paradox: today, we can be physically far from our desks without being in the least “out of touch” with company operations. Travel is no longer a forced pause or a disruption to work; it becomes an operational space in its own right.

The New Frontier: What Enterprise Mobility Really Means

It is precisely in this context that our concept of the “new Wild West” of corporate mobility is born. We are not talking about a defined geographical territory, and there are no maps capable of tracing its ultimate borders. Rather, it is a new paradigm in which work has shed its location-bound rigidity.

In a modern organization, movement is constant and multidimensional: people move (on business trips, remote working, or visiting clients); fleet vehicles move; portable devices move; goods, components, and documents move.

Enterprise mobility, therefore, goes far beyond simply working remotely or using a smartphone. It represents an organization’s systemic capacity to remain cohesive, informed, and efficient while people, assets, and processes continuously shift across locations. The core question has evolved: we no longer just ask how to reach our destination, but how to get there while ensuring seamless business continuity.

Beyond People: The Mobility of Goods, Data, and Workflows

When discussing mobility, our minds naturally jump to people: business travel, expense reporting, and company cars. But human resources are just one piece of a broader puzzle. Every single day, a company moves raw materials, finished products, orders, and information flows. Quite often, it is precisely these “invisible” movements that determine the success or stagnation of an entire value chain.

Moving a physical asset or a document is only half the job; the other half consists of maintaining traceability and governance: knowing exactly what is moving, where it is located, what stock remains, and what action needs to be triggered in warehouse operations. True mobility integrates logistics management with corporate strategy, allowing the organization to retain total control over processes even when everything is in transit.

The Tools to Navigate the New Frontier

If traversing the territory in the Old West required stagecoaches, waystations, and paper maps, companies today require an integrated technological infrastructure capable of accompanying work throughout its dynamic phases.

The ecosystem of software and hardware solutions plays a decisive role here:

Travel and Workforce Management: Solutions like ZTravel Zucchetti simplify and automate the entire lifecycle of business trips, from initial planning to expense report approvals, eliminating bureaucratic inefficiencies for employees on the go.
Fleet Governance: With ZCarFleet Zucchetti, vehicle management and cost planning become completely transparent, creating a smooth communication channel between fleet managers and employees on the road.
High-Performance Hardware for Mobile Productivity: Next-generation devices, such as the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold8 Enterprise Edition and Galaxy Z Fold8 Ultra Enterprise Edition, transform individual mobility by providing expansive screens and computing power ideal for consulting complex dashboards and processing documents on the move, entirely bridging the gap with fixed workstations.
Logistics and Operational Traceability: Through Ad Hoc Revolution Web and its dedicated Warehouse Module, monitoring goods, inventory levels, and accounting transactions happens in real time, enabling the governance of material and information flows from anywhere.

One Need, New Solutions

From horses to smartphones, from stagecoaches to the cloud, the means by which we cross our operational frontiers have evolved extraordinarily. What remains unchanged is the primary need to move in order to create value.

The true revolution of enterprise mobility is not about keeping work stationary to maintain control, but about making the organization connected, agile, and integrated enough to move alongside its people and assets. That is the true new frontier of efficiency.

Ready to take your company's mobility into the new era?

From travel and fleet management to cutting-edge devices and warehouse logistics: discover the suite of solutions designed to keep your business moving without ever losing control.

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Digital Santa: Inside the North Pole’s Transformation

alba — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 11:05:22 +0000

You don’t need to believe in Santa Claus to understand that his “operating model” is anything but simple.

We’re talking, in fact, about the largest seasonal logistics chain on the planet: orders arriving from every continent, incredibly tight timelines, centralized management, a production workshop with hundreds of workers, and a delivery system that set the standard long before giants like Amazon.

And yet, as iconic and timeless as it is, even the North Pole has found itself facing the same reality that many companies encounter today: tradition alone is no longer enough to sustain complexity.

In recent years, the amount of information to manage has grown exponentially, along with customer expectations, regulations, the need to integrate different tools, and the pressure to keep everything under control.

It’s a universal phenomenon, one that affects everyone, even those who, for centuries, have relied more on magic than on technology.

The Moment of Awareness: Realizing the Old Model Is No Longer Enough

The turning point, in the case of the North Pole, came at the most ordinary yet revealing moment: a daily process stopped being “simple.”

Letters no longer arrived only on paper, but as emails, online forms, voice messages, and even shared lists. Elves were managing production through spreadsheets, notes, and improvised tools, while the reindeer required delivery routes optimized with far greater precision.

In short, the workshop had become an ecosystem of micro-activities that were no longer working in harmony.

And so, even the most optimistic CEO (red-suited, bearded, and with an extremely busy yearly schedule) must take a moment and ask: “Is what we’re doing still sustainable?”. And in this case, the honest answer was: no.

When Technology Comes: Organizing Without Losing the Magic

Digital transformation didn’t come to erase tradition, but to elevate it, to make it suitable for the present and the way we all work today. When Adamantia began working with the North Pole, the goal was clear: build a reliable, scalable, and integrated infrastructure without compromising what makes that ecosystem so unique.

Step by step, tools were introduced that any modern company would consider essential:

A modern ERP to manage requests, materials, production steps, and shipments.
A DMS to ensure important documents wouldn’t disappear into a sea of paper.
Production support systems for planning and operational management.
Cloud and security solutions to protect data and ensure business continuity.
AI tools to automate repetitive tasks and provide virtual assistants.
BI platforms to analyze key data and generate accurate forecasts.
Waste-management systems aligned with regulations even stricter than ours.
DocFinance to keep the North Pole’s finances under control.
Small but powerful solutions like invoice factoring and whistleblowing systems.

The result wasn’t a “modernized” North Pole at any cost, but a North Pole fully aligned with the true complexity it has to manage.

Data at Work: When Information Turns Into Fairy Dust

The most significant change wasn’t aesthetic, it was functional. For the first time, every decision, from inventory management to delivery planning, could rely on clear, updated, and readable data.

In actuality, what happened mirrors what occurs in real companies:

fewer errors and less dispersion
greater operational speed
processes that are repeatable, measurable, and controllable
the ability to avoid waste
faster cross-department collaboration
more time available for high-value activities

The Future of the North Pole and of the Companies That Recognize Themselves in This Story

The world will keep becoming more complex, customer expectations will grow faster, and everything will be wrapped in increasingly intricate regulations and interconnected workflows. And the difference won’t be made by those with the most resources, but by those who know how to organize them best.

That’s why Santa Claus, with a pragmatism you wouldn’t necessarily expect given his age, chose to equip himself with solutions that can evolve over time, integrate, scale, and respond to whatever comes next.

And that is exactly what Adamantia builds every day for the companies it supports: not simple software, but systems with a natural continuity over time.

Maybe you don’t have a fleet of reindeer. Maybe you don’t receive millions of requests in one night. And maybe your demand isn’t measured in handwritten letters from children. But every organization has its own complexity, its own seasonal peaks, its own operational bottlenecks, its own “wish list.”

And every time a process becomes complicated, an information gets lost, or a data point isn’t clear, the question remains the same: “Is there a better way?”. The answer is yes. And that’s exactly where Adamantia can prove it.

Do you have a laboratory that is changing, just like the North Pole?

Let's talk about it together: we can help you find the right technology combination to transform data, processes, and ideas into real operations.

Turning Tides – Tech Sustainability for the Oceans

alba — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 10:02:23 +0000

Water is a crucial resource for the existence of both planet Earth and the living beings populating it. Our bodies are made of water for the most part and 71% of the globe is covered by oceans. This particular composition, which is unique in our solar system, makes the climate, oxygen and any form of livelihood depend on water. Even if we retreated like hermits on top of a mountain we would still need oceans to survive.

For decades the preservation of our ecosystem has faced hard challenges, too often though, in the comfort of our own bubble we cannot focus the issue on a larger scale. By 2050 the quantity of plastic (by weight) in the oceans will outnumber the fish and that comes as no surprise given oceans today contain almost 86 million cubic metres of plastic, for the most part crumbled into microplastics, pieces so tiny to not be visible by the naked eye.

The NextWave Project

It may look like an odd link, but the connection between oceans and technology is actually very deep. In 2017, Dell Technologies saw an opportunity in ocean-bound plastic and set a long-term goal to match the circular design with the reuse of such materials.

Following this philosophy, they gave life to NextWave Plastics, a consortium made of big corporations that decided to take action and repurpose ocean-bound plastic (otherwise left to float and pollute only) by creating new products and consumer objects.

In 2023 NextWave Plastics entered its fifth year of activity counting the equivalent of 2,27 billion plastic bottles diverted from the oceans thanks to a network operating among 21 countries with specialised ocean-bound plastic suppliers that sort and manage the material to deliver Nylon 6 e 66, PET, HDPE and PP to the consortium’s organisations so they can reuse it to produce new items and packaging.

The Closed-Loop

Electronic waste has rapidly become one of the most concerning factors in the ecological landscape: just think of how many little pieces have to be puzzled together to make even one laptop. Until 2020 just 17,4% of electronic devices were documented as correctly sorted and recycled.

With this in mind, Dell Technologies decided to invest not only in long-term goals featuring circular design but also to tackle e-waste as much as possible for the older devices (and therefore devices that are more complicated to disassemble and recover) to prevent these from disappearing in the generic waste uncontrolled.

Thanks to the collaboration with Covestro, the biggest producer of polycarbonate and resin, Dell Technologies managed to introduce the concept of “closed-loop” regarding the lifecycle of a laptop. In the first experimental steps, they found that by reusing the plastics and resins of old laptops, after a grinding and blending process, the newly produced parts didn’t lose any of their strength and could reach, after a third cycle, a 72% recycled product. Considering the average lifespan of a laptop stands between 3 to 8 years, applying such cycle could extend the life of each part to 32 years.

Concept Luna

What about the new product lines? The goals in this case are just as interesting. We’re talking about “Concept Luna”, an initiative started two years ago by Dell Technologies tracing a very specific design manifesto where nothing goes to waste.

Besides an intensive usage of recycled and renewable materials such as carbon fibre, bio-rubber, bio-plastics and scraps from other industries, the focus of Concept Luna resides in the modular design of laptops, with fewer screws and adhesives and more snap pieces to allow a better disassembly or repair and an easier re-usage.

To this day, this concept is applied to more than 125 different product lines making the whole Dell Technologies’ product portfolio 90% recyclable and renewable. In addition, the organisation promotes free collection of old devices for those who don’t know how to sort them correctly.

EcoLoop – An example of sustainable excellence

With the EcoLoop carrying bag, Dell Technologies demonstrated that ecological responsibility doesn’t stop at the electronic devices we use. To be honest, it could be quite counterproductive to own a perfectly sustainable laptop but to carry it in a bag which was produced in factories or with materials that are all but attentive to emissions.

The first big difference outlined by EcoLoop is the innovative dyeing process involved. While the majority of these processes feature the immersion of textiles in dyes with softening agents, emulsifiers, additives and various toxic chemicals, the technique used for EcoLoop employs mixing the dye directly with the polyester pellets before it becomes fibre. This can cut by 97% the amount of water used in the process.

Both the internal and external sides of the bag are made with 100% recycled polyester which once was ocean-bound plastic. The equivalent of 34 million plastic bottles has been yet diverted to produce EcoLoop, making the product eligible for the Ocean Cycle ™ certification.

Although EcoLoop is indeed an example of excellence for Dell Technologies’ sustainability, many other items present high levels of recycled plastic in them: accessories like stands, arms, webcams, speakerphones, docking stations; Precision workstations; Latitude and XPS laptops; the packaging in which all these products are shipped.

Find more statistics at Statista

Tech road to net zero is still a long way to go, however, it doesn’t mean goals cannot be met. The reach of awareness by many key corporates in the global economy surely determines a clear, scientific-based and well-documented path. 86% of executives consider sustainability a crucial investment in order to protect the ecosystem, the quality of our life and the organisations we work for. The time has come for us to turn tides, both for the big and small fish, each in their own water flow so it can keep on being viable without pieces of plastic all around.

Discover our commitment to ESG

APPetite for Tech: The History Of Apps

alba — Mon, 15 Jan 2024 13:34:48 +0000

We use them to wake up, to know what the weather will be like, to listen to music while driving, to spend most of our spare time between a poker game and the last scroll on Instagram before going to bed. Apps are a crucial part of our lives and those who deny it know they’re lying. Through apps we consume and manage pretty much everything, we can also have virtual access to a number of things that once required long queues in places much resembling Dante’s Inferno, and it is important to specify: without a Wordle in hand to kill that wasted time.

It is quite strange to look back and search for the origins of something so recent. In fact, pinning a starting point is even more difficult, given the gap in the race is really a matter of months. One thing seems to be certain though: we cannot talk about apps without considering the evolution of mobile devices.

Mobile Pitecus – PDAs eand first mobile phones

It all started in the fabulous 80s, more precisely in 1984, when Psione launched on the market “Psion Organizer”, the first PDA to feature integrated software equipped with a calculator, calendar, text editor and address book. Even though phone calls were not supported, Organizer shall be considered a true forefather of smartphones.

Later, in 1993, it was Apple that provided an upgrade of dear old Organizer: Newton. Unlike its ancestor, Newton could connect to Mac, PC and wi-fi networks, but it also presented new exciting functionalities as a web browser and email client.

Unfortunately for Newton, 1997 saw the rise of a new and improved PDA called PalmPilot: much easier to use with a default development kit giving developers space to create apps for that particular interface.

A glorious mention belongs to Nokia though, which in the same year brought the game experience to the entire world with “Snake” in their 6110 mobile phone.

Mobile Sapiens – The rising of smartphones

At the end of the 90s, the world witnessed the first big steps in terms of technology applied to mobile phones. From IBM’s Simon in 1994 to Ericson’s GS 88 Penelope in 1997, applications like address books, calculators, clocks and calendars are beginning to be found in the same device that was used to make phone calls. This means that by the dawn of the new millennium, a lot of much-elaborated systems (iOS, Android, Symbian) paved the way for modern smartphones, for instance, the first iPod in 2001 contained card games and Tetris.

Even though Steve Jobs, back in 1983, already had in mind a primordial configuration of the Apple Store with software that could be bought by using a telephone line (which attempt was made in 1990 by Paget Press with the Electronic Wrap Paper, a store for NeXT systems applications), the dream came eventually true with iTunes and then with Apple Store for the launch of the iPhone 3G in 2008. It’s not actually possible to identify what the first ever app was here because the new Apple Store was launched with 500 apps ready to be downloaded.

Google followed a few months later with Android Market (grandfather of PlayStore) equipped with 800 apps for HTC Dream with the Android system.

Applications usage grew fast in very little time so as to reach 1 billion downloads in 1 year only and a remarkable 50 billion in 5 years.

Among the apps that made history we cannot bypass Angry Birds with 2 billion installations in 4 years, the first wild marketing ever generated from an app to feature merchandising, themed parks, branded food and beverages by the most famous birds of all times. Other apps to have conquered the podium are Temple Run with 100 million downloads in 2011 and Draw Something with 1 million installations in just 9 days from launch.

Apple was not wrong when defining that moment as the “app revolution”, a glimpse of modern history that created around half a million jobs from scratch along with extraordinary revenue just a few years after the iPhone’s debut.

Users’ habits shifted priority a little with the expansion of social media, first with Facebook, then Instagram and Snapchat which in 2014 counted an average of 700 million pictures shared on the app each day.

Mobile Sapiens-sapiens – Apps in 2023

Apart from a tangible increase of interest in game apps and social media, our current times include in the list instant messaging apps which allow users to communicate with anyone, smoothly and with no extra cost. The gratuity of apps is in fact one of the main reasons for this phenomenon’s success: the user may not be hooked forever but at least they can have a taste of what being part of the digital community feels like.

To this day the Apple Store counts circa 2,2 billion apps available for download, while Google Play Store counts 2,8 billion. In 2023 around 299 billion app downloads were registered confirming a growth trend that has no intention to stow down.

Most downloaded apps in 2023 according to AppleStore

1. Temu: Shop Like a Billionaire

2. CapCut – Video Editor

4. Threads, an Instagram app

5. TikTok

6. Instagram

7. Google

8. YouTube

9. WhatsApp Messenger

10. Gmail

Mobile Future – The future of apps

But what the future of apps will be? What trends will determine the next chapter of this epic digital transformation?

The focus seems to lay on 5G technologies which guarantee a higher speed and better user experience, but AI is also a hot topic which deserves attention for pioneering activities on biometric measurements and algorithms capable of predicting our actions based on past behaviour. In the app crystal ball though, there’s also space for AR and VR, for wearables such as smartwatches and earbuds (the number of wearables connected every day verges on 1 billion), for a smart home integrated with household appliances, lighting and heating and last but not least for travels (cars, flights, hotels etc.).

The thing is, in such a small amount of time apps have flourished in a phenomenon that won rightfully a place in history, not only technologically but mostly socially, changing people’s lives forever. If the change has been for the better or the worse, well, each one of us individually should give their answer, but what is to be certain of is that it’s almost impossible to think of the capitalist and globalized slice of the globe without a smartphone in one hand and by this, we can surely assume apps will be with us for many years to come.

Discover all the HR apps for your company

Thanks to our HR Zucchetti solutions you have an app for everything

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Business Travel In An Ultra-Connected Environment

alba — Mon, 11 Sep 2023 10:41:02 +0000

Briefcase, tie or Chanel suit and Montblanc fountain pen smoking hot from business signatures. If someone should give a stereotypical definition of a “businessman/businesswoman”, our memory would fly instantly to Richard Gere in Pretty Woman or to the tenacious Fallon Carrington of Dynasty. And somehow, even not considering the charme of famous actors playing the role of powerful CEOs, that kind of allure around business travel can still make its way into our fantasy. From the invention of mobile phones on, who can honestly say they’ve never pictured themselves in Miranda Priestly’s office, where a year’s work evolves around the perfect business trip to Paris?

Well, maybe reality is a little different and we all know that very well, although we like a little daydreaming. However, there is something movies can frame well enough: the tools of an era and the usage we make of them. Today, we might giggle at the old PDAs and Blackberrys from the early 2000s, let alone the legendary mobile phones of the 90s, huge chunks of plastic as heavy as a brick. Yet, our modern mobile phones, super-slim, super-tech and super-everything, fulfil the exact same task those oldies used to do: establish a connection with other human beings even if we find ourselves in another physical space.

Each need blossoms as a social need first and then we adapt the same schemes to jobs, to school and to the most unlikely environments. Think about the incredible growth of video call platforms during the Covid-19 pandemic: the need to belong to a social hub was in danger and technology came to rescue immediately, copying and pasting the same process to work meetings, school lessons and yoga classes.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise when we see a certain connection between business travel and the desire to stay in touch with others. Any traveller lives in an ultra-connected bubble: I can access work emails from my phone, I can write an instant message to a colleague, I can take a picture and post it on the company profile and if that’s not enough, what’s the problem? I can slide out the laptop from my computer bag and work on a presentation for the sales department I have to pitch in next week. And boy, how we get mad when the internet connection doesn’t work and the train wi-fi comes and goes.

Many ask if this lifestyle will be the social downfall of work life, however, we should first ask ourselves if there is, and in case which is, the technology we would be willing to cut off for the sake of philosophy. Who knows how many of us would go back to the times when in order to purchase a plane ticket one had to go to the airport without having not even the slightest idea of its cost at least from a free downloadable app on the phone. Or simply to go back to queueing at the post office or at the bank, for hours, without being able to do anything else in the meantime, not even the daily Wordle on the Times.

Technological progress is our enemy inasmuch as we want it to be. It would be absurd to think about our daily life without the possibility of switching on the light if it’s dark or lighting up the stove if we are hungry, and yet our grandfathers didn’t have access to such comforts. In the same way, a few decades from now, people will expect technological availability and its comforts, and those travelling for business, with their USB-integrated suitcase and Airpods in their ears, with a QR code ticket and e-passport, will have the same kind of charm Edward Lewis had in 1990.

Discover the convenience of business travel

Thanks to our HR Mobility solutions from Zucchetti you can manage your trips, expenses and car park conveniently from the integrated app

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Ada Lovelace: The Woman Who Revolutionized Computer Science…In The XIX Century

alba — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:02:30 +0000

Thinking of XIX-century Great Britain many things come to mind such as romance novels with tormented love stories and ladies trussed in corsets and Victorian gowns. What is less familiar to our common imaginary is to localise such women in less romantic contexts like mathematics and science, let alone in something pioneering like computing.

Yet, the most unlikely stories make it to history, even more than those filled with passion “Pride and Prejudice”-style. Our main character is a lady, yes, who, however, liked numbers above anything else. She is Countess Ada Lovelace, the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke, who conquered, hands down, the title of first-ever computer programmer.

Ada’s background is to be considered wealthy indeed, however, the life of an English woman in the 1800s was anything but easy. Ada never knew her father, her parents separated only after two months after she was born and her mother tried very hard to keep her from the “excessively poetic” (= irrational) traits of the Byron dynasty. Lady Byron was determined to give her daughter a different kind of life and she hired tutors and teachers who would teach Ada maths, music and French.

But the extraordinary opportunities given to Ada are not limited to studies alone: her wit and intelligence take her places in the London social panorama. During one iconic event in 1833 Ada meets Charles Babbage, renewed mathematician, and her life takes an unusual turn. Everybody is talking about Babbage’s “Difference Machine”, a tower of numbered wheels which could make calculations simply by turning a handle. Ada decides to go see Babbage’s creation for a demonstration and she’s incredibly fascinated by it, so much that the two scientists begin a correspondence in which they share thoughts about the potential of such machine and they discuss ways to improve it.

Ada’s ambition and spirit bring Babbage to draw a new project called “Analytic Engine”, a giant machine made of thousands of cogwheels which could make even more complex calculations with great accuracy. The project lands in Italy in 1842 and Italian engineer Luigi Menabrea writes a scientific article about Babbage’s machine and its functionalities. With a great deal of interest rising in the scientific community, Babbage asks Ada to translate Menabrea’s article into French with the total freedom of adding her personal notes. Ada’s article is three times longer than the original one and her notes show an insightful point of view, along with a deep comprehension of the machine that nobody else had. The most famous part is the “Note G” where she literally develops an algorithm to calculate Bernoulli’s numbers, something that translated into computing could have worked on a modern computer.

Starting from Babbage’s mechanical calculator (by the way, designed but never actually made), Ada first imagined, then wrote software for an electronic calculator (inclusive of devices, memory and calculation unit) which goes way beyond basic numeric calculation. Her vision has become the starting point for all the computing development in the 1930s and 1940s which brought us to modern technology.

In the 1970s the American Department of Defense developed a coding language called “Ada”, a tribute to the scientist’s foresight. This language is still in use today, especially in contexts where reliability is everything such as aviation or military.

Since 1998, the British Computer Society instituted the “Lovelace Medal” and annually sponsors the “Lovelace Colloquium”, a conference for women undergraduates in digital and tech.

Us too, in the making of Adamantia Group, we wanted to pay tribute to Ada by making it part of our name so that we can always remember where we come from and where we want to go.

A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.

Ada Lovelace

Energy Efficiency – In Charge with Adamantia Group

alba — Thu, 13 Apr 2023 08:15:28 +0000

Since last autumn, energy efficiency has been one of the many social topics on the hot seat, making this issue more and more a financial one. Not that this comes as a surprise really, communities always worry when the financial status quo is shaken and if there is something we all have in common is the bills we pay.

If on the one hand, the net zero goals seem way too far, the latest electricity market report made by the Milan Politecnico Institute gives us hope. So at least, even if we won’t stop being sceptical, we won’t be swinging on the edge of a cliff waiting for the wind to make us fall down.

An authentic tug of war that has to find its own balance: between increasing energy demand and the danger of producing it with no sustainable resources. So where does this leave us tech pros? We strongly believe we have the duty to show people how technology can be the key to avoiding collapse and making a problem a viable solution.

Our effort

First of all, we wish to dispel the myth that we don’t have enough tools to fight climate change. Well, nobody has a magic wand able to reverse all the misery that industrialisation and a naive laissez-faire attitude have brought over the years to the hands of the new generations. What we do have though, is a technological power like never before strong, tested, in continuous development and most importantly easily accessible by everybody.

As a tech company, we know that thanks to any ERP or HR software people can save tons of paper and avoid most non-necessary business travels. Of course, software needs hardware so it is crucial this is optimised at its best not only during its usage but at the beginning of the chain too.

On the occasion of Earth Day the next 22nd of April, we would like to share with you our commitment in terms of ESG with the campaign In-Charge we created with Adamantia Group in collaboration with Dell Technologies.

We hope this can be inspiring to all those businesses who wish to adopt a lighter touch on our planet while saving precious resources to reinvest in a much more aware manner.

Visit our dedicated page and download the free e-book

The Importance Of Being A Logo

alba — Tue, 07 Mar 2023 13:38:29 +0000

Thinking of famous brand logos, it’s funny how our minds immediately go to modern marketing, that of social media and tv adverts. Yet, the necessity of giving symbols an enormous communicative power can be traced way back in time, back to the paintings in the caves or engraved in stone. The term “brand” itself comes actually from cattle owners in the far west who branded their animals to declare ownership over them. If we think about it, the basic concept of “branding” has not changed at all and today we design logos with the intention of saying that our business is ours and nobody else’s.

But what’s the ideal job description for a logo? No, it doesn’t require flexible hours or teamwork efforts, but rest assured your logo can be a model employee for your company.

The “boss” of brand identity

One of the most common requirements for a candidate is to speak more than one language. So what if you get one that can speak them all without saying a word? Your logo has to speak for you universally: your story, your vision and the core values of your business, and it has to do it clearly with no room for misunderstandings.

A logo though is not only the flag bearer of your brand, it’s especially the storyteller of it. Most of the company’s storytelling is based on your logo, its colours, fonts and images; all traits contribute to the making of branding material such as letterhead, business cards, merchandise, packaging, billboards, website, social media etc.

Clothes make the man

You need to dress up properly for a business meeting. And if you do it, why shouldn’t your logo do the same? Apart from being appropriate based on context, grooming is what satisfies the inevitable human tendency of judging a book by its cover. We are not indifferent to aesthetics: our emotions give us feedback on whether we like something or not and often the sheer emotional preference is enough to make us buy a product from a particular brand.

A logo must wear the best clothing in order to be perceived as reliable, and worthy of your attention, which is maybe one of the most precious conversions in a society that has everything except time. With an attention span in constant decrease, your logo has between 2 and 5 seconds to make an impression and in such little time, you will not have any other available resource (human or not!) able to make it.

Love at first logo

Now, to fall in love is one thing, but to make it last forever is definitely something else. The greatest joy for a brand is a client’s long-term loyalty, and consistency goes hand in hand with the experience we have with a brand. For a consumer, when a continuous interaction goes well, a brand earns positive connotations which go way beyond the single purchase/product. In such cases, logos work as led lights in the dark able to be recognised by the customer thanks to their familiar traits. It’s not surprising Financial Online stated that 75% of people recognise a brand by its logo: symbols can make an impact on our memory, much more than words.

The most recognized logos of all time

Coca Cola

McDonald's

Nike

Starbucks

Walt Disney

Chanel

Apple

Google

Microsoft

Amazon

Facebook

A spark in the dark

In a lightbulb shop, however, to be the brightest led light of all it’s not really that easy. Unfortunately, there is no fast lane for logos, but there are emotional fast lanes your logo can rush on in order to stand out. Being unique is a crucial message your logo has to communicate and you have to understand what it is that makes you different in an oversaturated market: is it your colours? is it a pictogram? or maybe a particular font? Whatever your precious detail is, make sure you use it at its best to tell everyone that among 50.000 led lights, yours is the best.

How many do you know?

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Investing in your logo means investing in your future. Appearance is important in our society because it is in our psychology in the first place and to go against our nature can hurt your business irreversibly. Hire a good logo, train it and give it time to grow: you will find yourselves with the perfect employee you will never want to get rid of.

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“I’ll Do It Later” – The Art Of Procrastination

alba — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 11:31:08 +0000

There is no need to lie, we all do it from time to time. Right when you are about to start writing that pending email, you suddenly find yourself reading a bad review of the restaurant your friends booked for next Saturday or watching an Instagram reel of “what J Lo eats for breakfast”. By your twentieth stroll on Amazon, it’s already lunch time and that infamous email hasn’t left your bay yet. You knew you had to do that simple task, but you didn’t so you begin to feel a certain sense of guilt that unfortunately won’t change the fact your email won’t be sent, not even tomorrow.

Procrastination is a very common practice and from what we know it “just happens” and lies behind lies such as “I didn’t have time”, “I had other things to do” o “I forgot”. Nothing to worry about if it’s just a sporadic reaction or if the email we’re talking about is addressed to the producer of your favourite cereal that instead of putting two spoons of raisins in the bag, just put one. In case answers like those keep on going for a while and for most of the daily tasks, then it’s very likely we have a serial procrastinator, someone you should not trust, even if it’s you.

Portrait of a procrastinator

The one question that makes a difference when talking about apparently nonsensical human behaviour is: why is this happening? I knew very well I had to write a work email, I didn’t do it and I can’t say why, I just know I didn’t accomplish what I planned. When we procrastinate we still have our goal in mind but no executive action takes place. Instead, our brain turns the spotlight onto other types of actions available which even if they don’t bring any result, distract us and relieve stress. Anxiety and fear can be the trigger to postponing tasks: we wait consciously, and we feel guilty only to feel additional anxiety. In other words, we create a vicious circle which is hard to break.

In order to explain the tendency of a procrastinator, Tim Urban, founder of Wait But Why, uses the Eisenhower Matrix:

According to Urban not all procrastinators behave the same way: some do useless things like strolling on Youtube watching panda bears falling, and there are some who do more useful things like dusting the house, however without actually focusing on what’s really important to them. While people normally move between quadrants 1 and 2, pure-breed procrastinators only swing between quadrants 3 and 4: dusting the house with no meaningful goal (4) or watching cute, yet not important, panda bears rolling down a hill. The only change happens when panic takes over and a quick leap onto quadrant 1 is made, before falling back on the ground floor.

Perfectionist VS Lazy

There might be endless reasons that lead to procrastination, however, there are a few common causes. We already acknowledged fear is a key emotion and while looking at the big picture, the fear of failure and responsibilities can lead to constant postponing. Having too many things to do and little time to do them is ironically a very good reason to go on standby mode. Bad time management is another key element in the procrastinator’s brain: our society rewards efficiency and productivity, so to avoid pressure we postpone an urgent task in spite of something more pleasant to do. Last but not least, we find perfectionists. A perfectionist procrastinator is that friend from university whose nose is on a book 24/7 but still, they won’t attend the exam because they don’t feel prepared enough.

Whether you are a perfectionist or a lazy human being who declared war to the hoover, one question you should consider asking yourselves is: are my goals realistic? Sometimes the lack of control over a goal can crash self-esteem and generate useless procrastination.

Techniques to avoid saying “I’ll Do It Later”

No worries, there is hope for everyone. Even the worst procrastinator can take control at some point. The trick is to face your fears by taking baby steps; plan micro-goals before going bigger and stop regularly to see if you’re going in the right direction. Whatever your goal is you will have to spot priority tasks and non-priority tasks and choose accordingly without reaching for the sky. To manage your daily tasks make sure to write down checklists: you will find great satisfaction in drawing a line on a finished task. Moreover, thanks to modern interactive digital calendars all of this can be easily done with notifications and reminders on your pc or smartphone.

In conclusion, if the procrastinator inside of you is aware some help is needed, then you already took action to get close to the solution. In any case, in order to save ourselves from extremism, remember we cannot be always 100%-performing; taking a break from time to time can be revitalising.

It’s Work O’Clock – The History Of Time-Tracking Clocks

alba — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 14:18:36 +0000

For thousands and thousands of years, human beings have tried to measure time. Scientists did their math by inventing sundials, calendars, hourglasses and clocks of any kind only to satisfy the tracking of our perception that time does pass by, even when we’re working. The first worksheet noting tasks, work hours and pay dates back to 1772 b.C with the Hammurabi Code and since then, similar attempts have been made by the ancient Egyptians, the greeks, the Chinese and the Romans.

It is no surprise that during the 13th century, medieval artisans began to make mechanical clocks commissioned by the Church so that the monastic community would know when it was time to gather together for prayer. That way, by ringing the bells of the local church, the whole community in the nearby village would participate in the religious activity at the same time. It’s incredible how such an old practice is still part of our everyday life: we can rest assured that every church bell will ring at noon and at vespers’ time.

Although this method was quite alright for rural villages during the middle ages, unfortunately, it wasn’t enough for scientific experiments, sea sailing or contexts where high precision was needed. And yet, all around the globe, most people lived without clocks until the first half of the 1900s. For hundreds of years, farmers, fishermen, merchants and artisans woke up at the crack of dawn to go about their daily tasks and came home when the sun went down without caring about what time it was. People’s schedules were driven by nature only: sunlight, seasons and weather, so even their daily activities would change much from one season to another.

Around 1750 technology in the manufacturing industry introduced new machines powered by steam engines which modified the history of humankind forever. Work pace became frenetic and in order to sustain such a higher production volume, factories needed constantly-performing workers who would keep fires always going or change thread spools at the speed of light.

The arrival of industrialization (1750 – 1870)

Between the 18th and 20th centuries, all those workers recruited in the countryside who hadn’t been worrying about time until that moment, suddenly found themselves lining up to clock in, at the same hour, every single morning. Entrepreneurs spent an incredible amount of time managing the people working for them so they hired clerks whose job was to take note of the time workers arrived at work and they did so by using spreadsheets, direct ancestors of modern Excel spreadsheets.

Basically, in each factory, workers were expected to be punctual if they didn’t want their pay to be deducted (or any other punishment the rulebook stated). In the state of New York, Mr Benjamin Hacks installed a giant clock in his factory so he could track production times. In Massachusetts, textile industries adopted a system of bells ringing when the gates would open, when breakfast and lunch were served and when the shift started. Often bells were replaced with the steam engine’s whistle which could be heard from the houses where workers lived so they could get off the bed and go to work.

A new century

The turning point towards automatic time-tracking clocks was at the end of the 19th century with the first experiment made by Williard Bundy who, by associating the typewriter mechanics to a clocking system, managed to obtain a report of the hours worked by each worker. A second attempt was made by Alexander Dey in 1893 with a mechanical gripper on a wheel which the worker could action by using his employee number. But it was Daniel Cooper who in 1894 built a clock in which you could insert a card and get a stamp on it with the time of the entrance of every single worker in the factory.

Cooper’s invention was a real success and quickly spread across the Country. In the same year the Bundy Manufacturing Company was founded, the first real producer of time-tracking clocks, which, after a few acquisitions, became the International Business Machines in 1911, better known as IBM. The company worked on clocks for many years before focusing exclusively on computers.

In 1915 at Ford Motor Company you could find as many as 129 time-tracking clocks in synch with a master clock set on Detroit time. The “clock manager” was in charge of checking each clock every single day to make sure everything was up and running, and if that wasn’t the case he could use one of the six spares in the warehouse.

A new millennium

At the end of the 70s, the way is paved for clocks able to communicate with payroll software. In Italy, innovation comes from Zucchetti, who already presented the first time and attendance software in 1986.

And it is at the beginning of the new millennium that technology strikes again with digitalisation: the old card becomes a “badge” and after a few years this is made completely virtual thanks to applications and software which we can now use from the comfort of our smartphones, anywhere and anytime, even with biometric technology.

It’s safe to say all the actions one must once do to say they clocked in and out don’t reflect our society anymore. The same tasks today are brought to the minimum effort making HR processes extremely easier and efficient.

We cannot know what technology will bring us in the future and as we leave that job to innovation, we can only be grateful for the amazing perks our ancestors could only dream of.