To digitalise your business, you first need to understand your customer's business.

How would you summarise your business model? What do you do? Hermes is an IT consultancy company that has been developing and deploying proprietary software solutions to support businesses for 30 years. However, with the arrival of a new generation of owners, our ambitions have become bigger and more international. Today, we are the largest Slovenian partner for Odoo cloud solutions, which is currently the fastest growing business platform in the world. Our Gold partnership also puts us in the top 5% of Odoo partners worldwide. Our advantage over our competitors is our excellent knowledge of business processes, systematic and agile approach to projects and a range of the right solutions for our existing and potential clients. Before implementing business solutions, we focus on two key questions: what are the key business objectives of the company and what are the constraints in the client's organisation or business that may affect the successful digitalisation of the company. Based on this, we focus on optimising business processes, selecting suitable business solutions and transforming employees, which is an important prerequisite for a successful digital transformation of a company. Simply, we want to be the best partner in their business growth. Do you actively seek out customers yourself or do they find you? We have a strong base of existing customers, who often bring us new ones. A satisfied customer is usually the best promotion. We advertise through digital channels, which I believe is the most effective way to communicate with the market today. At the moment, the Odoo platform itself is generating the most new customers. It is already used by more than 8 million users worldwide and when Slovenian or foreign companies are looking for a Slovenian partner for implementation, they often come to us. We are the gold partner with the most certified consultants and the most references in Slovenia and probably in the wider region. In which areas are you most active? Which solutions are most in demand by your clients? Companies are looking for solutions that will best support their business and the needs of their customers. It used to be strictly business information systems (ERP), but today it's online shops and cloud solutions that are more customer-oriented. Most of our new projects are in the area of trade, service and service on the Odoo platform. What arguments do you use to convince companies that you are the right provider/partner for them? Customers like to hear that you have a long presence in the market - in their eyes, that's security. We emphasise professionalism and experience, and we have a huge number of reference projects and clients (over 500). And today, clients can quickly tell if a provider really understands their needs and challenges. I often say: it is one thing to listen, but another to hear and understand. If you understand your client's needs and business, they will quickly recognise and trust you as a partner. And that's the key to our work. When they see how capable Odoo is as a solution, the scales often tip in our favour. Digitising a business or digital transformation is not just a one-off project - how do you explain this to your customers? Different. We have customers who get it and customers who don't. Those who really understand the importance of digital transformation usually also understand the argument of continuous evolution and change. The business environment is a living thing, customers and their habits change, the way we work and communicate with suppliers changes and the digitalisation processes in the company must follow suit. How do you work with your customers when introducing new technological solutions? Smaller companies tend to be highly engaged and active, and many want directors to be in the loop and make key decisions themselves. In larger companies, however, the CEO is just a "client" or sponsor of the project and too often expects everything to happen on its own. But we have a clear methodology for deploying our solutions. First, we carry out an analysis or quick diagnostic of the client's business, align expectations and inform the client about the project's content, the process and potential risks. This is followed by active work with the client's team in the form of interactive workshops and the development of any specific customisations, where there must be a common interest in keeping these to a minimum in the end. The live commissioning represents the transition into production work and further support to the client under a maintenance contract. As a technology solutions provider, you have a good insight into the state of IT in companies. What do you think the IT environment in Slovenian companies is like? What is good, what is bad? Slovenian companies have a large number of customised software solutions. And these solutions are not bad. Some of them have been building their IT environments in this way for 10, even 20 years. When the need to change or upgrade comes, we as consultants have an extremely challenging job. In many cases, it is difficult to translate all that legacy into a new solution. Our job is to make our clients understand that we also need to think about modernising processes and sometimes reorganising, while trying to use as standard a solution as possible. Only such a solution is truly scalable and therefore always future-proof. If this does not work, then specific adaptations to the standard solution are needed, which also mean higher maintenance costs. Fortunately, those responsible in companies are already aware of this challenge and are ready to change, at least in principle. What is your biggest challenge in this respect? The biggest challenge is definitely to achieve a shift in the minds and thinking of customers. We want to make them aware and convinced about how to support their business processes better and, above all, differently with a new generation of solutions and technologies. This is why a quality analysis and alignment of expectations is crucial, even before the start of any digitalisation of business. But are companies approaching the digitisation of their business in the right way? Which mistakes do they make most often? The most common mistake is certainly that companies impose digital transformation on the IT department. Digitising a business is not an IT project, it is a company-wide project. And as such, it needs broad support from management and key employees, otherwise it is is doomed to a poor outcome. Do you also do business internationally? Is "bread whiter" abroad? There are several international projects every year. Odoo has opened the door wide for such projects. To quickly summarise: the Western world offers us better quality projects, the Eastern world offers us more business, as many Slovenian companies have branches in the Adriatic region.