GAINING A COMPETITIVE EDGE WITH IN-HOUSE DEVELOPMENT TAILORED TO EVERY CLIENT
Today, businesses need partners that understand the challenges they face and can provide them with tailor-made solutions. Against this background, IT partnerships have enormous strategic importance.
We have focused on two major opportunities in the market: IoT and big data – collecting, processing and converting vast volumes of data in real time using our SmartTwin solution – on the one hand, and data protection and regulatory compliance – which spurred us to create SmartDPO – on the other.
Delivering Real Value For Our Clients
With a relatively small team, in-house development allows us to move faster with greater agility. Instead of just deploying generic vendor products that are often ill-suited to a specific client’s needs, we are able to offer solutions that provide real added value by truly making a difference in all our clients’ operations.
Our greatest strength lies in our approach. Our client relationships go beyond working on discrete projects – we build lasting partnerships. We pride ourselves on taking the time to understand each client’s issues and challenges, get to the root of them and fix them. Instead of delivering a fixed set of functionalities, our products continuously integrate new capabilities that benefit a broad range of users.
At Smartis, our partnerships are built on strong client relationships, co-creating solutions, and acting as an extension of the client’s own team. Just delivering a finished product is not enough – it is crucial that the end product is genuinely useful and tailored to the client’s needs. In discussions with our clients, we are committed to full transparency about any limitations and demonstrate flexibility when searching for solutions that deliver maximum value.
With a strong reputation and a proven track record across Slovenia and the broader region, we have established ourselves as a partner you can trust. Clients see us not as novices but as reliable partners, treating additions to our product catalogue as a natural step forward.
A Strong In-House Development Team
At Smartis, our development-first mindset is reflected in the fact that as much as 20% of our team works exclusively on service development, a clear sign of the segment’s strategic value for our organisation. SmartTwin, our flagship product, is an advanced, feature-rich platform that requires a skilled team and in-depth knowledge to truly take advantage of its powerful features, such as processing vast volumes of data and creating a range of assets within a single platform.
Another key driver of our development is our close cooperation with universities and research institutions in Ljubljana and Maribor. Through joint R&D projects, we bring together academic scholarship and real-world experience to put the theoretical models developed at universities to the test in real life. For instance, we can fine-tune lab-created models for real-world situations and integrate them directly into the platform to aid in data processing. This allows us to expand our portfolio and deliver real added value to our clients by providing advanced KPIs and solutions they can rely on.
Quantifying The Impact Of Smartis Solutions
At Smartis, client satisfaction is our most important KPI. We work with each client individually, focusing on the specific challenges they face. Because our top priority is obtaining factual feedback and forging long-term relationships, we hold regular follow-up meetings with our clients, monitor their user experience, and make sure the solutions provided truly meet their expectations.
Though any business is interested in revenue growth, this is far from our primary motivation. At Smartis, we believe that the success of our business is directly tied to providing our clients with solutions that make a real difference and create real added value.
Over the next three to five years, we will continue to focus on developing SmartTwin, where we want to prioritise real-time large-scale data collection and processing to optimise operations, reduce costs, and drive sustainable growth of our clients’ businesses. Our goal is to clean up, structure, and transform data into scalable solutions that can be applied across clients and industries, building models that act as value multipliers and enhance the utility of our technology. The experience gained and innovations developed by working on Slovenian and international defence-related projects – another focus of ours – has further strengthened our competitive advantage.
Why did we choose in-house development? At Smartis, investing in our own development capabilities was a conscious decision that allows us to be perfectly attuned to our clients and their actual needs, challenges, and objectives. In-house solutions provide greater flexibility, speed up deployment and create more added value.
Over the next three to five years, we will continue to focus on developing SmartTwin.
1 CASE STUDY: ENERGY MANAGEMENT
SmartTwin has a proven track record as a key platform for energy management and compliance with ESG standards. It enables businesses to collect and crunch real-time data across energy sources – electricity, water, gas, and waste – and convert them into accessible reports within a single dashboard. This allows CFOs and controllers to maintain an accurate, detailed overview of operational costs broken down by site and time span, while energy managers can instantly respond to overloads by, for example, shutting down non-essential systems or switching to battery power. This not only slashes costs, improves energy efficiency, and reduces the environmental footprint of the business, but also helps it draft ESG reports and plan for future needs with confidence. Whereas ESG may have been little more than a buzzword a few years ago, businesses now need specific ESG-compliant solutions, and that is where SmartTwin’s comprehensive data collection and processing becomes a key competitive advantage.
2 CASE STUDY: DIGITAL WINE FERMENTATION MONITORING
SmartTwin can also be a perfect fit for traditional industries. To name just one example, its flexibility and versatility have been demonstrated in viticulture, where digital wine fermentation monitoring has completely transformed quality control. Large wine cellars with many hundreds of casks often rely on a single oenologist to monitor the temperature and sugar content of each and every cask by hand, an obviously time-consuming and imprecise daily task that too often catches changes too late, while a single oversight can spoil the contents of an entire cask. SmartTwin, on the other hand, can automatically collect temperature and sugar content data in real time. The system continuously monitors readings and immediately alerts the responsible person if they deviate from the chosen parameters, allowing for swift intervention. This dramatically decreases the risk of wine spoilage and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual monitoring, allowing oenologists to focus on tasks with higher value added. The platform also automatically generates fermentation logs, ensuring a well-documented and transparent process.
3 CASE STUDY: SUPPORTING CIVILIAN AND MILITARY (DUAL USE) MOBILE BASES
SmartTwin plays a key role in ensuring the efficient operation of civilian and military mobile bases. Modern advanced field bases require highly flexible, resilient, and interoperable systems to monitor, manage, and optimise energy sources across all sites where energy logistics is of critical importance, supply lines are limited and weather conditions are unpredictable. As a tactical IoT platform, SmartTwin provides robust integration of energy sources (diesel generators, batteries, solar panels, wind turbines, etc.) and energy management systems (such as EMS or BMS), while enabling intelligent, autonomous control of these bases even at the network edge. This functionality is available directly at the base, completely offline – and as soon as an internet connection becomes available, key KPIs are synchronised with the central monitoring system. The platform ensures optimal energy use and improved logistics for supplying the base with energy sources. With several operational modes, it can turn devices on and off depending on the available energy sources: when running without diesel generators, for example, only essential equipment remains on while units such as space heaters are automatically disabled. The result is greater self-sufficiency at the base and higher comfort for personnel stationed there.