In an ever-changing world and increasingly competitive markets, every business must look to the future if it wants to scale its business properly and develop a competitive advantage. For this reason, it is essential to favor a culture of innovation, in particular by focusing on new technologies or applications.
There lies the objective of Cegid, which develops cloud management solutions to help professionals in finance, human resources, accounting and retail in the realization of their projects of today and tomorrow.
Digital is responsible for 2.5% of France’s carbon footprint
For Cegid, innovation rhymes with usefulness
Since its creation in 1983, Cegid has given a central place to innovation to support organizations in the digital transformation of their businesses thanks to innovative solutions, mainly focused on the exploitation of data.
” A major shift over the past four years has been to shift from the classic 20th century management vendor paradigm to the SaaS paradigm. This opens up new horizons for us to build the following explains André Brunetière, Chief Product & Technology Officer at Cegid.
This development is of course intended to support companies in their strategic choices, and in particular in a period when uncertainty makes existing models obsolete. It also aims to support companies that are beginning to digitize this process, such as VSEs. One objective: to offer them new, more practical and intuitive management, both today and tomorrow.
” We always hang innovation on a second word which is “useful”. This is because our clients are faced with a principle of reality: they must both prepare for the future, while being anchored in the present. For example, in finance, you have to work on 5-year business cases and keep day-to-day accounts. Same thing for HR, you need training programs over several years, but pay slips have to come out at the end of the month. With useful innovation, we address these two temporalities for our customers “says André Brunetière.
For this reason, Cegid applies this credo of useful innovation, another example, ensuring the store’s checkout system, while reflecting on the innovations that could be made there tomorrow. To do this, the company collaborates with its customers or specific market players who help it to imagine ever more efficient ways of working that could emerge in the years to come. This is where Cegid’s innovation is anchored: creating this path between the continuity carried out on a daily basis by a company and its future transformation.
The role of data in business transformation according to Cegid
Previously, digital was a matter for specialists. Not everyone mastered its codes and did not necessarily seize the opportunities it offered. Over the course of innovations and the digitization of companies, it has opened up to a wider spectrum of individuals, sometimes working in sectors, at first sight, far from digital.
” From now on, in a company, everyone is doing digital. One of our major areas of innovation is therefore to succeed in bringing added value to more users in the same organization through what we offer in our solutions. notes André Brunetière. ” Until then, digital remained a matter for specialists, they were very much in demand to contribute to “feeding the system”. They were expected to enter information, control it… However, it turns out that with what technology allows us today, the role of the human being in this part of entry and control is greatly reduced. . Thus, for our specialists, the time spent on the screen is no longer a time spent contributing to the system, but rather consuming the system. Which is very different, and in addition even non-specialists can consume! », adds André Brunetière.
For Cegid, these changes mean having to create new user experiences, allowing users to get the most out of their data management systems. In this type of solutions, it is the data that is mainly used. Cegid’s job will then be to suck up the raw data, understand it, format it, process it and provide the user with elaborated, analyzed and consolidated data that will enable him to make intelligent decisions.
” Once we establish a mode of use that goes much more towards consumption, that gives the mantra on which we will make all our innovations: to make this data available in a sufficiently intuitive, easy to use and appropriate way so that the user can take advantage of it “, explains the Chief Product & Technology Officer of Cegid.
For this reason, the company aims to provide a more intuitive and complete user experience. For example, it makes it possible to report an indicator concerning equal treatment between men and women within an organization. Cegid will not only provide a result ranging from 0 to 100, but also avenues for analysis that will allow this company to improve its indicator: analysis by age group, by profession, by department… The objective is knowing where to act.
For this, a challenge: to provide the right data, at the right time and in the right context. This involves researching the meaning of a piece of data for a type of user, what is most meaningful to him and when: at the beginning of the month, we ask ourselves “what are my figures last month?”, in the middle of the month “am I ready to file my VAT tax declarations?”, etc. For Cegid, this means constantly having to align with everyday life, day to day.
” These are going to be real subjects of innovation for us, both in this work of representation to give the desire to go further and the ease of going further in terms of intuitive user experience, and on the other next to the appropriate questioning of the user on the data that we are able to make available to him », develops André Brunetière. “We believe in data to provide a new user experience, in particular because we are faced with a deposit that has extraordinary potential,” he adds.
This conviction is what motivated the creation of the Cegid Data Lab, a support and mentoring program intended to open up the field of possibilities to early-stage startups. For Cegid, the objective is to have a new angle of attack concerning the use of this data, brought by young shoots. They come from fields in which Cegid has a wealth of data: in finance, in HR and in sales related to B2C activity. She then surrounded herself with several companies including Luego, a collaborative banking interface for start-ups, Kaptain Charlie, a solution aimed at maximizing the performance of commercial actions in stores or even M-work, a tool making the organization of hybrid work legible. , simple and smart for business.
Imagine the solutions of tomorrow
These collaborations with various start-ups, as well as the work carried out internally, allow Cegid to imagine the solutions of tomorrow for organizations, and to help them benefit from them. This is particularly the case with data visualization. This emerging technology consists of visually structuring data in order to make it easier to use. The goal is to see more clearly and easily establish strategic reports in order to accelerate decision-making in companies. This tool facilitates the understanding of information, often much more than Excel tables.
” This will make it possible to address many more users, and more simply to specialists. For the latter, it will help to highlight certain analyzes that they would not necessarily have thought of with the classic query system they were using. These are elements that we think will develop and on which we invest », adds André Brunetière.
Another solution in full development, predictive explainable analysis. Indeed, predictive analysis, which consists of using data to anticipate risks or opportunities, brings little value to a company when it is not accompanied by explanations. ” At Cegid, we are therefore going to develop tools that help companies on a daily basis, for example when they establish their budget for the year, but also collaboration tools to compare points of view, differences in analysis with what can provide these multifactorial analyzes “, explains the Chief Product & Technology Officer of Cegid.
With an eye always on the future, Cegid intends to continue work begun several years ago: supporting companies in their digital transformation, highlighting the constraints and opportunities that can be offered to them thanks to data and ever more innovative technologies.