Your organisation runs, creates data and makes decisions every minute of every day. Technology should easily support continuous, integrated and synchronised operational flow, create and store detailed data that reflect these operations in real-time and facilitate obtaining timely and reliable information to make the best decisions.
However, many enterprise software implementations are far from delivering.
- Spending time, effort and money writing code to customise the software creates uncertainty, perpetuates old practices and creates obstacles for future evolution.
- Building solutions around different modules or products that should be integrally connected creates data silos. This requires the development and execution of interfaces to share data between them.
- Monthly closing procedures and infrastructure maintenance tasks disrupt continuous operation and force users to use spreadsheets and email in an attempt to alleviate software deficiencies.
Timely and reliable information is hard to build from scattered data, so decisions are made upon best guesstimates.
The solution was to create a truly systemic, continuously available and totally adaptive enterprise software, capable of solving the needs of any company without writing one single line of code. We were told “this is impossible” and we remembered Henry Ford used to say “nothing is impossible, just no one has done it yet”. So, we took the challenge.
Our research and development efforts led us to create a new paradigm in the world of enterprise software, the Enterprise Operating System (EOS) platform, created to improve productivity, increase profitability, and enhance wellbeing in your organisation and your team.
Our focus was the operation. We observed thousands of users doing their everyday work and documented which tasks were the same through every company, which were the variations, and, most important, which ways of doing things really made the difference between one organisation and another. We identified how we could help to improve their work and designed the technology to maximise their performance.
The key is the process. Every organisation is built around business processes and every process is built by individual interconnected transactions. Our most important goal is to allow every user to do every transaction at any time from anywhere directly on LOVIS EOS. This way, the data that reflects the event is created when the event is happening and by the person who knows exactly what is going on.
This required the development of an easy to use, fully configurable, continuously available, transactional and systemic enterprise software, able to reflect organisational reality in real-time and to evolve with your organisation.
With a two year plan in place, we began the analysis and design. After nine years customising our MRP software for over 200 clients, we had lots of documented requirements from different companies, sectors, sizes and countries. We made three commitments: Create one single universal, configurable version of the software, eliminate the need for monthly and annual procedures and make it very easy to implement and use.
As a company founded and run by Industrial Engineers, our priority has always been the process. We see the transactional workflow like a manufacturing process, where each event is like a workstation: every event is caused by a previous one and triggers the one that follows. Applying time & motion techniques gave us lots of insight on the similarities between each organisation, and most importantly, their numerous and subtle differences. Peter Checkland’s Systems Thinking methodologies provided the tools to simplify the complexity.
After a couple of successful projects with one of our clients, he trusted us enough as to become the test pilot for this endeavour. Two years later we finished the development and first implementation of DynaWare, the predecessor of LOVIS EOS. Our client was very happy for its flexibility, reliability and ease of use. It fulfilled their needs, supported their processes, run 24/7 non-stop and delivered the needed reports. Now the challenge was to sell it to the rest of our clients. Then the journey really began.
With each new client, new subtle, and not so subtle, variations on the processes appeared. It was a growing challenge to integrate them without disrupting the ones that were already in place. Many times we were tempted to deviate ourselves from our single universal software commitment. We resisted, and this happened to be the most valuable decision we made. This allowed us to concentrate all our knowledge and effort on one single version, which became more powerful every day.
Eliminate monthly and annual closing procedures required us to develop new technologies like Dynamic Hypercubes to avoid their static cousins. Model a completely integrated database so every transaction could be processed immediately. Operate on the new period since the first moment without having to close the previous one. Applying and reversing transactions at any active date and bring their effects to the present date. Run at the transaction layer deriving a three dimensional accounting in a fully automated way. Build the required infrastructure to allow any user to allow our clients to run 24/7 from any device, anywhere in the world.
There is a little book called “10X” which states “the time, money and effort you estimate to achieve something will take you 10 times”. After 20 years we arrived. We had either implemented or tested our platform in auto-part manufacturing, bus building, mining, hospitals, restaurants, savings and loans, fabrics, chemical, pharmaceutical, plastics extrusion and injection, government, security, funds, NGOs, food, beverages, travel services, technology services, technical support, and more in England, United States, Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, Spain and Mexico.
LOVIS was founded in 2014 and the journey to bring our Enterprise Operating System to the world began.