Interview with AntemetA

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IT systems are becoming ever more powerful and complex – and ever more critical to the businesses that depend on them. AntemetA, a specialist in IT infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, has spent thirty years helping companies keep pace with the digital world.

Headquartered in Guyancourt, just west of Paris, the company founded by Stéphane Blanc serves more than 1,000 customers – from SMEs to large enterprises and public-sector bodies – and reported revenue of €104 million in 2024. AntemetA designs, deploys, optimizes and maintains IT infrastructure, in the cloud and on-premises alike. Flexibility and responsiveness are at the core of its offering: its turnkey storage and backup solutions allow data to be restored in record time, for instance after a ransomware attack.

Technology alone, however, does not deliver that kind of responsiveness. It takes the right people, in the right place, at the right time. For AntemetA, the ability to orchestrate its resources has become a strategic priority.

“Our teams are set up to handle exactly this kind of crisis,” says Josoa Razafindrakoto, ERP Manager at AntemetA. “Those are the moments that show what our people and our products are really capable of.”

An ERP at the heart of the business

In its early years, AntemetA ran on a home-grown system. In 2003, the company was acquired by a group running Attain, the forerunner of Navision and today’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central.

Much custom functionality was built into that on-premises environment over the years. But when Navision reached end of life and Microsoft stopped releasing updates, the company had to move on – to Business Central Online, hosted in the Microsoft cloud.

Today, “Business Central really is the heart of our company,” Mr. Razafindrakoto explains. “We do have specialist technical tools for certain teams, but everything else runs through the ERP: sales, trading, order administration, services, maintenance, inventory management…”

Business Central really is the heart of our company. - Josoa Razafindrakoto

A new way to schedule resources

The move to Business Central did raise one major question: resource scheduling. AntemetA had relied on a scheduling tool built into its old ERP, and that tool could not simply be carried over to Business Central. The company needed a new solution.

AntemetA’s long-standing partner Prodware, a Microsoft integration specialist, pointed them to Dime.Scheduler. AntemetA reached out to Dime.Scheduler, who assigned a French-speaking contact to keep the conversation easy.

The brief was clear: a graphical planning board giving an at-a-glance view of resources, projects, tasks and activities. For a company of some 300 employees, many of them technicians and engineers, that visibility was essential. AntemetA now uses Dime.Scheduler to schedule around 150 resources – all of them people – across more than a hundred concurrent projects.

Beyond the feature set, AntemetA was keen to preserve continuity with the tool its teams had used for the best part of a decade. After a few months of close collaboration between the two companies, all of AntemetA’s scheduling data was migrated to Dime.Scheduler without a hitch.

The morning after the cut-over, the teams found all their data waiting in the new planning board, with no manual re-entry required. For Mr. Razafindrakoto, that continuity was a big part of why the rollout succeeded.

The morning after the cut-over, the teams found all their data waiting – nothing to re-enter.

Smoother day-to-day planning

The biggest difference from the old system is how the teams work with their calendars. Previously, users could open only one calendar at a time, and had to close it to do anything else. Dime.Scheduler’s multi-window approach makes scheduling noticeably faster.

“Today, our staff keep the calendar open all day long – they can have three or four open at once and plan side by side,” says Mr. Razafindrakoto.

Scheduling is done on an intuitive graphical interface: projects on one side, resources on the other. Planners simply drag a project onto the right resource and set the start and end dates. The information is then synchronized automatically with Outlook and Business Central.

Everything needed to keep track of a project is right there in the interface: the project manager, days still to be scheduled, days already scheduled and other key indicators. When a project is completed, the corresponding information is updated automatically.

For users, this visual approach makes everyday tasks easier, and the planning logic mirrors habits they already had – such as creating recurring sequences.

What I like about Dime.Scheduler is that everything is remarkably easy to do. - Josoa Razafindrakoto

Quickly adopted by the teams

Eight months in, Mr. Razafindrakoto is pleased with the outcome: “The application caused no particular issues, either during deployment or in adoption by the teams.” The fact that users recognized the logic of their old tool went a long way in the transition, while they also gained the benefits of a fully web-based, multi-window environment.

Mr. Razafindrakoto notes that his colleagues now hardly ever come to him with questions about Dime.Scheduler, even though he led much of the project himself – “which tells me the product works well!”

AntemetA at a glance: Guyancourt (FR) · 300 employees · 1,000+ customers · 150 scheduled resources