The Department for Development and Economic Cohesion is the body of the Ministry of Economic Development responsible for the planning and management of funds for disadvantaged areas of the Italian territory.

SIGE is the Italian Army's Information Management System. It is designed to facilitate the proper and effective conduct of all logistics operations and management in a comprehensive and integrated manner.

This application is distributed over all Bodies, Commands, Detachments and Departments (EDCR) of the Armed Forces across the country and foreign theatres.

SIGE is held in a database (Central database - BDC) and the following subsystems:

• Weapons, for dealing with the construction data and the management of potential supplies, planned checks and corrective action relating to weapons systems and equipment of the Armed Forces
• Materials, for logistics and the management of administrative and accounting consumables and repairable materials. It is nterfaced with automated warehouses. The subsystem also performs the technical management of ammunition
• Maintenance for the technical management of office processing and works accounting
• Personnel, for the treatment of personal, registration, employment, health and instructional data relating to the personnel of each agency
• Health, for the management of health data both for assistance at home and in outpatient care
• Payroll, for the calculation and centralised processing of salaries, with document printing at the individual agencies for active personnel, and for calculation of pension benefits and their payment to retired personnel
• Money, for the automation of all accounting and financial management activities in the context of the Administrative Services of the Agencies
• SIGE System Administrator for the configuration of users and access policies and to enable a two-way flow of information based on requests from the Centre and the system management
• Central Database, to enable hierarchical consultation up to the Chief of Staff of synoptic data from the branch offices

This application has a 3-tier architecture and is replicated for each EDCR. It should be noted that each EDCR actively manages SIGE, producing a large number of accounting and administrative documents every year, as well as handling material movements and purchasing

• Responsibility for the operation of the whole system lies with the SIE OFFICE, where a dedicated team has been created to manage emerging issues in peripheral areas. This team is charged with managing a highly complex architecture, spread over more than 400 locations, both in Italy and operational theatres. SIE’s main task is the amount of work generated by demands made by these organizations, in addition to the normal activities of periodic application and database updating. The time taken for a simple check on an EDCR database whether aligned or not must be multiplied by 400! Prior to the adoption of Sentinet3, these activities were extremely expensive, considering that all systems had to be upgraded to the latest SIGE release and that checking whether an agency was aligned demanded a remote connection (including a login and password) and a manual querying of the system.

  Main problems reported by the SIE OFFICE include:

  • Accounting mismatches
  • Non-aligned application versions
  • Misalignment of inventory materials
  • A lack of an application overview

Thanks to the adoption of Sentinet3, the SIE office managed to put all EDCRs under control in just 20 days. Implemented controls allow:

• Automatic status checks of the alignment of peripheral systems
• Automatic checking of accounting mismatches within the materials subsystem.
• Checking of misalignments in the materials inventory
• Visual displaying through multi-level maps of the overall and specific systems statuses

A great added benefit is the ability to constantly monitor a geographic map (whether national or worldwide) showing EDCRs and displaying their status.