Italian SME delivering IoT smart farming integration and agricultural training for EU research consortia.
SYSMAN Progetti & Servizi is a small Italian consultancy specializing in project management, dissemination, and business integration services for agricultural innovation projects. In their early work they contributed to IoT-based smart farming deployments, helping translate precision agriculture technologies into business value for food chain actors. More recently they shifted toward training and capacity building — organizing summer schools, MSc-level courses, and staff exchanges to transfer smart water management knowledge to research communities in the Western Balkans. Their company name ("Projects & Services") reflects their profile: they are enablers and communicators who help larger research consortia reach practitioners and early-stage researchers.
IoF2020 (2017–2021) placed them inside a large-scale pilot for Internet of Things applications across the agri-food chain, with explicit focus on IoT business integration and data-driven farming.
Both projects list dissemination or knowledge-transfer as explicit keywords, and SMARTWATER (2021–2024) used a Coordination and Support Action scheme whose core deliverable is capacity building.
SMARTWATER keywords include summer school, advanced course, MSc study, early stage researchers, and staff-exchange — all pointing to structured training activities targeting junior researchers.
SMARTWATER addressed smart sensing, evapotranspiration modelling, and irrigation optimization in Bosnia and Herzegovina, combining remote sensing with practical water-use efficiency.
From 2017 to 2021, SYSMAN was embedded in the IoT and precision farming world — contributing to large-scale business pilots that connected sensors, data, and food chain actors across Europe. After 2021 their focus pivoted sharply: SMARTWATER's keywords are dominated by academic training terms (summer school, MSc study, staff-exchange, WoS publications) and Western Balkans capacity building rather than technology deployment. The thread connecting both phases is agricultural technology, but the mode of engagement shifted from deploying innovation to teaching it.
SYSMAN appears to be moving away from technology implementation roles and toward project dissemination, training delivery, and Widening Participation activities — making them a natural fit for future Horizon Europe CSA-type projects targeting capacity building in Southern or Eastern Europe.
SYSMAN has never served as a project coordinator — all participation has been as a partner inside large consortia. IoF2020 alone involved dozens of organizations across multiple countries, which explains their unusually high partner count (92 unique partners) relative to just two projects. This suggests they are comfortable operating as a small node in complex networks, delivering a defined slice — likely dissemination, training, or business engagement — without needing to lead.
Despite only two projects, SYSMAN has touched 92 unique consortium partners across 17 countries — a testament to having participated in IoF2020, one of the largest H2020 agri-food pilots. Their geographic exposure spans Northern, Western, and Southern Europe plus the Western Balkans through SMARTWATER.
SYSMAN occupies a niche that sits between agri-tech and project services: they understand both IoT-driven farming at the business level and how to train researchers and practitioners to adopt it. For consortium builders needing a Southern European SME with dissemination capacity and contacts in the Western Balkans, SYSMAN's specific blend of agri-food business experience and structured training delivery is relatively uncommon among Italian SMEs in this space.
