Company: Pro Systems, Inc.
Owner: Anthony P. Vitale
Employees: 23
Type of business: Full-service computer network. Hardware, software and service.
Location: 1450 Pontiac Ave., Cranston
Year founded: 1980
Annual revenue: $2.3 million
INSTRUCOR AND OWNER of Pro Systems, Inc. Anthony P. Vitale explains the system to a class.
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For Pro Systems, the three S’s of success are sales, service and support. Operating with a business philosophy that owner Tony Vitale calls ‘single-company responsibility,’ Pro Systems offers the benefits of several different types of computer companies under one roof.
“The client can make one call,” said Vitale, “and we service everything, be it hardware, software, network service, or repairs.”
Founded in 1980, Vitale’s company is among the oldest computer specialists in the Northeast. The business was born from the ashes of Singer Business Machines, a major manufacturer that went out of business in the late 1970s. Vitale and two other former Singer employees saw that quite a few of Singer’s customers had nobody to provide service for them. The three men formed Pro Systems as a customer service company. When the company started, businesses had very little automation, Vitale said.
“Everything was still done by hand, a lot of cards were being used, and whatever automation was there, the marketplace was very hungry for it, so we would have to provide the technology at that level,” Vitale said.
A 1950s Flex O Writer sits in the front room at Pro Systems. The machine, which is one of the first automated business machines, is a reminder of how far technology has come in recent years.
As technology grew to become more affordable, clients were looking to get off the old platform and onto the new way of doing things, but many of these companies were going about it the wrong way.
“In the late ’70s and early ’80s, most companies were still buying computer systems that were manufacture-driven,” said Vitale, “the software only worked for that particular manufacturer’s computer.”
At this point Pro Systems began to develop its own line of software, and could provide sales as well as service.
Pro Systems worked with clients to create software that would not require changing the way those clients did business, but, rather, make the software flexible enough to accommodate them. What skills the clients did have to learn were taught to them at the Pro Systems training center. Vitale’s company would provide the equipment, training and repairs as a package-deal.
When his two partners left, Vitale continued to take care of sales, and had two employees to program and fix the systems.
“I’m more or less a business person who understands how software and hardware can save clients time, energy and money,” said Vitale of his role, “I put the teams together, define the needs, and bring the resolution.”
With his crew’s customization process, Pro Systems began to create universal industry-specific software and hardware, based on the way that the majority of their clients were doing business. The most obvious industry to tap into was the jewelry industry.
“Most of the businesses that we could look out the window and see were jewelry manufacturers,” Vitale said.
Most jewelry manufacturers are family businesses, Vitale noted, and Pro Systems is also a family business. Tony’s wife, Anne Marie, works in accounting at the Cranston headquarters, their son John is in customer support, and their daughter Dina was with the company until recently, when she married. The key to dealing with these businesses, said Vitale, is that they are “businesses where technology is not their main thrust.”
Pro Systems’ JeMS software is the result of the industry-specific undertaking. JeMS includes features such as order entry, inventory, manufacturing, costing, accounting, sales analysis and reports, all in a fashion that is easy to grasp for those who are not particularly tech-savvy. The program also features production tracking, labor tracking, jewelry imaging, and bar coding. JeMS is not only used by over 25 jewelry manufacturers in Rhode Island, but by customers throughout New England and even in New York and Asia.
“Our business became more focused because we were calling on a wider geography,” said Vitale
While the company was expanding into other regions, the local front heated up so much that businesses that were not even using Pro Systems software were calling on the company to solve hardware issues and network issues. In many cases, these customers were impressed enough to switch their network to Pro Systems’.
With such a high demand for service, when an opportunity arose to acquire Process Automation Corporation’s Computers Plus, a service company, Vitale knew it was the match for which he had been waiting. The deal was completed this past July.
He saw in the company a knack for network and product installation, implementation and support services. Where Pro Systems’ application customers totaled 150 before the acquisition, the client base now numbers in the 600s, because of all their new service customers. And Howard Zisserson, one of the original founders of Computers Plus, has come on board as senior sales specialist in technical sales. Where the company numbered three before, there are now 23 employees.
The issue that Pro Systems has been busying themselves with most recently is the Y2K problem. Although Vitale says the company has been notifying clients of the possibilities of problems for the past three years, he says, he expects “some rather interesting phone calls after the first of the year.”
For the last two of those three years, Pro Systems has been certified for Y2K compliance. “It is a serious problem,” said Vitale, “There are consequences that will cause interruptions, and how far it reaches, I’m not sure, but I’m pretty confident the major infrastructure of our economy will be well taken care of”
Although confident, the company has nevertheless cleared its schedule to devote the first two weeks of January to fixing any millennial melee that could occur with clients’ computers. “Nothing but support mode,” Vitale said.
And if nothing goes wrong?
“Long vacation,” he said.
