How it all started…

In February 2021, me (Omar Al Kababji), Andrea Quagliotti, and Antonio Venere met on a Friday evening at an Autogrill along the A1 highway near Parma, Italy. We were returning home after a week of post-live support for a client. I was traveling from one plant, while Andrea and Antonio were comming from another plant. At that time, Italy was under a nationwide lockdown due to COVID-19, and travel between regions was permitted only for work, health, or emergency reasons, lucky us!

At the Autogrill, we ordered our drinks and sandwiches and head back to my car to eat them (typically eating in my car is not allowed 🙂 but it was a particular period), as we ate and talked we got the idea of kicking-off our own company, hell yes, in full pandemic period we had this crazy idea! I guess we were tired, really tired… we were already doing things we love in Rockwell, a fantastic company. But as all enterprises, there are rules to follow, there are different departments, different business units, visions, ideas not necessarily inline with yours, so the pace of change is completely different compared to a small company or startup. We started imagining, what if we can decide things by our own? Instead of consuming considerable amount of time and energy justifying why something should change, we could actually change it, right away! of-course in the good and bad, but at least we could invest our time and energy in doing things we believe would benefit both the customer and the company.

It was late, we were tired and we thought we were crazy, so we called it a day, jumped into our cars and went back home, since that day, the idea kept growing in our minds, we started thinking about it more seriously and in July – 2021 we took the big step and created PragmaTech.

What we do…

We offer specialized services to the manufacturing sector, focusing on the delivery and integration of systems across various operational levels. Our expertise cover:

• Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES/MOM)
• Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
• Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)
• Tailored solutions that might be needed by factories.

We integrate these systems with higher-level platforms like ERPs and PLMs, as well as lower-level systems such as PLCs and SCADAs, ensuring seamless data flow and operational efficiency across the manufacturing process.

Thanks to our experience in this field, we can cover the whole project life-cycle, from requirement analysis to post-live support. Our experience is based on Rockwell Automation products like FactoryTalk Production and FactoryTalk PharmaSuite (FTPS), or basepoke solutions for specific productions.

We love technology, software-engineering, user experience and most importantly simplicity! we love to tackle complex problems and find simple solutions to solve them, most of our solutions even though they solve complex problems are typically characterized by ease of use from a user perspective, we strive to achieve what we call Elegant Solutions. Elegant Solutions don’t only solve current problems, they are built with maintainability and evolution over time, thus they are built in a way they require low-maintenance, and can easily change when the problem changes.

What else can we do… Most of our solutions are somehow related to the manufacturing industry, we have experience in pharmaceuticals, consumer and packaging, fashion, grains, metals … and others, we know the ins and outs of these domains, nevertheless in our core we are strong software engineers who deliver software based solutions, if needed, we can do anything that has to do with software.

Our technology stack

Although technology evolves and changes and we have no problems in using different technologies, our current technology stack is the following:

• Java for backend
• AngularJS for frontend
• SQL based databases
• CI/CD based on Azure DevOps or Jenkins
• Docker
• Git
• Groovy as scripting language
• Android

In summary… This post is an introduction to PragmaTech just to know a bit about us and what we do. This blog will be our window to the external world, we will use it to talk about our journey, decisions we make, sharing know-how and experiences… etc.

If you are interested, you can subscribe to our newsletter so you get notified when we share something new, instead if you want to know more about us, feel free to contact us, we will be glad to help.