ETAss

ETAss is a non-profit association, whose partners are industrial companies, universities, representative organisms for companies, regional and national associations, business professionals, research centres and other non profit organisations. ETAss has in the past facilitated general and technical dissemination connected to projects in the area of technological innovation, information society and research including implementation of exploitation plans for consortiums that have received approval by the European Commission and other national and international entities.

ETAss' mission is to support the various management and cultural changes that take place in enterprises wishing to globalise their activities with the use of specific Information, training and management support tools.

ETAss provides to public organisations, associations and enterprises general support services regarding re-qualification of personnel through:

• the analysis of companies overall objectives and strategies;
• international expansion;
• technological innovation and management change in general.

More specifically, ETAss contributes to the process of internationalisation of enterprises: this is achieved through ETAss’ networking activities, dissemination of best business practices derived also from European R&D results.

ETAss provides expert advice and support to enterprises with respect to innovative management techniques and assists them in achieving a fuller exploitation of the opportunities provided by new technologies innovation.

ETAss’ experts advise on the opportunities available and support companies and other institutions through the phase of implementing new technologies innovation.

ETAss seeks to play a distinctive role in mobilising and making aware enterprises - and public and private organisations - of the advantages in taking part in EC Programmes.

ETAss provides a wide choice of services, in response to any Content, Learning and Knowledge Management need.

Thanks to our innovation technologies and methodologies based on long experience in the training field, we can support organisations and enterpirses  and organisations in the field of human development projects:

• Content Production
• R&D
• Training and Consulting

SERVICES

ETAss provides full selection of services for implementing your learning strategies.

With our active engagement  in R&D projects and training specification organisations we are in the position to guarantee the implementation of learning strategies using the latest technical and methodological  innovations.

A team of skilled professionals in the fields of training content allows us to provide with advanced services for the creation of:

• traditional and multimedia courses for on-site, on-line, off-line and blended training in the management fields
• e-Learning content
• multimedia DVD and CD-Rom

Our experience  (more than 10 years experience in the new-media-based communication and education) and a long and acknowledged track record in the training sector, offers support with highly professional consulting and training services.

Here are some of our main consulting services:

• needs analysis
• feasibility studies
• training courses on-site (standard and customized)
• multimedia courses on-line
• designing new business and performance evaluation models for training.

Regarding learning technologies, ETAss created its own Learning center, using Macromedia’s NQ Content platform and adapting it from CMS (Content Management System) to LCMS (Learning Content Management System), developing a specific e-learning methodology which is used both in lifelong learning paths. All technological and methodological skills requested by e-learning are available within ETAss working team, which is used in designing, developing and tutoring distance and blended learning paths. The experience brought in ETAss by different members of its team started to develop different years ago, during the design of Lombardy’s regional Guidelines about distance learning, and grew afterwards, thanks to different professionals who took part to national and international e-learning projects and shared their knowledge within the team.

Nowadays, ETAss can count on a professional team, which can easily decline its professional and technical skills in different working contexts.

The relation between the experience gained in dealing with projects, according to the experience developed in different e-learning context, makes ETAss very fond in the usage of new technologies as tools oriented to social inclusion: new technologies make women able to conciliate better lifetime and working time, most of all in particular moments of family life (when a newborn is coming, when parental care is needed by elder members of the family, and so on). One of the most important things that ETAss is aimed to disseminate between women is properly the conscious usage of new technologies, and proposing e-learning paths is one of the best way to carry women through a supported experimentation of new technologies advantages.

EUROPEAN PROJECTS

ETAss has participated and is participating in different European projects, such as:

• ETABETA - the project aimed to help develop a truly Trans-European training market by assisting the match of supply and demand through a web-based training brokerage service. The ETABETA consortium developed and deployed a brokerage service model meeting the needs of companies and SMEs that require a clear, complete and easy way to access information about the wide and fragmented training-offer market. The ETABETA service were focused upon meeting an unmet European need. It provided service users with an innovative approach to a WWW based 'one stop shop' of Europe wide training provision with enhanced, supported access, so that companies can identify training opportunities in a quick and exhaustive way across the whole of Europe.
• IS4SME’s – this project has been developed under the PROMISE programme for the evaluation and diffusion of Information Technology in SMEs. It has been developed with the participation of the Industrials’ Trade Union of the Lecco district.
• WONDER MAR – an ESPRIT project aimed at improving the information exchange by strengthening the link between research teams working on a common project.
• CIMA – an ESPRIT programme jointly developed by ETAss with the Milan Polytechnic and other training institutions in Europe and Australia: Centrim - University of Brighton, Core CORE (Sweden), Twente - University of Twente (Holland), University of Dublin - Trinity College (Ireland), InCITE - University of Western Sidney (Australia), McArthur Australian Co-ordinator - University of Monash, Melbourne (Australia), University of Wolongong - New South Wales (Australia). The aim of the "Euro-Australian co-operation centre for Continuous Improvement for global Innovation Management" (CIMA) project was to set up a co-operation centre to facilitate co-operation and knowledge transfer between Europe and Australia. In particular the aim was to enhance the quality of co-operation among European and Australian companies, research centre and other no-profit organisations, facilitating conjoint activities involving knowledge transfer and allowing mutual learning.
• RECITE – an ESPRIT project aimed to develop better methodologies to assess the impact of IT within Industries.
• BENeBUS - BENeBUS project (Benchmarking of e-business solutions for western and eastern Europe SMEs) brings together academics, associations, and consultancy companies all specialised in the field of new technologies from Bulgaria, France, Georgia, Italy and Poland. BENeBUS project is an accompanying measure wich focuses on the E-Business and New Methods of Work in the context of international co-operation, involving Eastern European Members and New Independent.
• REGIS - The objective of REGIS was to develop a Computerized Client Management System (CCMS) for an insurance "agents based" company, supported by a Virtual Entity (VE). This was an original product of applied artificial intelligence (AAI), which allowed the company to progressively extend the mass and kind of managed data, including non-formal information on the clients relationships.
• GLOBE - Given an existing or new business process, a typical BPR (Business Process Re-engineering) tool supports its modelling, its analysis and evaluation, and the simulation and animation of its likely behavior. Existing tools suffer from various limitations, among which: they do not allow the definition of a complete performance model; they offer a limited BPR decisions support; they do not provide support in the implementation of the re-engineered process, that is in the development and establishment of the necessary organizational, managerial and, particularly, IT infrastructures. In this scenario, the project defined a new generation of BPR tools, capable of overcoming the above limitations, and developed, test, validate, demonstrate and exploit a specific tool (namely GLOBE).

PARTNERS

ETAss has carried out development projects and research for such organisations as:

• European Union Commission
• Regione Lombardia
• Pecat Foundation for the development of relations among Italian and Polish companies. (Poland)
• BIA – Union of Bulgarian Industrials

and is also involved in performing research and training programmes with universities :

• CENTRIM - University of Brighton (UK)
• CORE - Università di Gothenburg (SW)
• Monash - University of Monash (Australia)
• Academy of Economics, Bucarest (ROM)
• MIP Politecnico - Milano
• Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore - Milano
• Università di Padova - Padova