User Review
( votes)We recently had the opportunity to speak with Ken Fischer, the CEO of Atigro Inc. Atigro is a custom software and systems integration company that is focused on what the company calls ERP asset revitalization. A significant portion of that is leveraging multiple types of LLMs throughout the platform. We were interested to find out more.
- So, could you tell us a bit about Atigro?
Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you. For almost 20 years, Atigro has been a custom software and system integration company that has helped companies of all sizes. In the past five years, we have focused on two areas – enterprise resource planning and more recently, incorporating artificial intelligence.
In fact, we just announced Atigro AI-ERP. It is a set of practical ERP augmentation services and a secure AI toolkit. When we implement it, businesses can successfully upgrade and revitalize investments already made in ERP assets to gain real oversight, control and efficiency of their business operations.
- Why have you focused so significantly on ERP?
ERP is not a new tool. But in 2024, it was estimated that annual ERP sales would be more than $81 billion globally. Additionally, ERP has the potential to touch, transform and drive significant ROI in almost every part of a business’s operations.
ERP platforms are powerful tools, and the companies producing them are making great products. We don’t compete in that space. We see huge opportunities because we help companies rejuvenate their ERP investments by augmenting them and making their integration into a company that much better.
- But if companies have invested in ERP platforms, isn’t that enough?
By purchasing or licensing an ERP platform, companies have certainly derived an ROI, otherwise the category would not be thriving. Unfortunately, most ERP implementations are too rigid to effectively adapt to a company’s operations. Another problem is that a company’s data storage has been housed in disparate databases, or more commonly, on excel spreadsheets or even paper. This has hindered ROI and hampered the addition of practical and useful ERP advancements
Usually, large pockets of a business have been addressed by the ERP integration. That’s where we come in. We assist companies to integrate the last 10 – 15% of their operational procedures and data that have proved impossible for them to digitize. Today, companies still manage a significant amount of their data on spreadsheets and paper. There are unwritten processes that haven’t been captured, examined and integrated into their ERP systems.
Our approach is to systematically hunt down all data sources, rationalize them and integrate them. And we do mean all. We also capture, document and integrate all business processes. It’s incredibly thorough. In fact, when we work with clients, we find the activity is a forcing mechanism to ensure that procedures that were made “on the fly” are well thought out and kept or changed – and then integrated.
- Isn’t that just Workflow?
No, because we aren’t just capturing procedures and looking for ways to digitize them. We are integrating both the data and the procedures with the ERP platform. Sure, at the end of a project, we hand clients a detailed manual of the policies and procedures we have uncovered – and mapped – but these are institutionally integrated with the ERP platform.
We augment existing ERP assets, mapping them to true business workflows, rationalizing and tying in disparate data sources and strategically interspersing intelligent AI agents. These scalable system enhancements deliver real-time insights, drive efficiencies, improve accountability, clarify reporting and provide companies with actionable intelligence to exploit previously unrecognized business opportunities.
- So how does AI come into play?
ERP systems are great for managing a business. They assist with asset management, HR and payroll management, billing management, purchasing and logistics and asset management, among many areas of a business.
We harness the power of AI to create tailored AI agents that dynamically interact with people and databases throughout ERP workflows. These intelligent AI agents accept requests from employees and access information from databases and other data sources, solve tasks and provide results in an easy-to-consume manner. This makes it easier for employees to focus on work activities instead of data entry – increasing their efficiency, satisfaction and retention.
But the key to this is uncovering, rationalizing and digitizing the last 10-15% of a company’s procedures and data. Once that happens, we help them with the AI integration to ensure that they gain real efficiency and control.
Our toolkit complies with enterprise security and DevSecOps best practices, can be integrated with Entra-A or Corporate Google Workspace logins, and uses multiple enterprise-ready databases. It also can be integrated with custom mobile apps. It also contains an AI-friendly event system which makes it easy to research and understand past transactions in the system.
- What do you see as the largest impediment to AI integration in ERP?
It’s not the ERP platform that is really the problem. These are very powerful tools. It’s that they miss the last 10% – 15% of the data and business procedures. It’s the data kept on spreadsheets and paper. It’s the woman or man who has been with the company for years and has uncatalogued knowledge and workarounds that could be gone tomorrow. Getting that last bit of data and information integrated with the ERP is critical.
Integrating AI will help. But if you don’t get that last pain point under control, AI integration – and other advancements in ERP technology – won’t really provide the ROI executives expect.
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