Farmer Communication Services (eFarmer)

The eFarmer project (www.efarmer.sk) , our most important success in regards to our engagement within the submission of EU projects, advanced in line with the approved time schedule. Its focus on the provision of services towards farmers to gain financial aid for crops and land and on the creation of a structured content information system has raised interest not only among farmers of the Visegrad Four (V-4) countries who are involved in the project implementation but also among farmers from other EU countries and new candidate countries. Besides Novitech a.s. 8 other partners from V-4 countries are taking part in the project. The overall project budget is €4m, from which €2.2m has been contributed by the European Commission. The primary project benefit is the creation of a system for common agricultural policy which embraces services provided to rural regions in view of information and functionality concerning claim preparation, implementation, and submission. Internet, electronic claim submission, and electronic services focused on supporting the development of the agricultural sector in the less developed regions of the V-4 countries will become the project’s main pillar.

The project has been launched with success and the first outputs, the so-called deliverables, were created. Within this first project period the following parts were successfully created and submitted: A generic claim submission system, a system for processing of the consolidated Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, a basic eLearning system for farmers with integrated handbooks for claim submission, such as SAPS, LFA, and Top-Ups. In 2006, national customisation of the system will take place reflecting the conditions of the EU pilot countries of the project (Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland).

eBusiness Training Support (eBTS)

The eBTS project was successfully completed by the end of 2005. It is a project pertaining to the set of FP6 Leonardo da Vinci Programmes projects of the European Commission whose objective is to acquaint and train target groups of small and medium size enterprises in the field of e-business based on the import of German know-how from the company Uberbetrieblicher Verbund, Wiesbaden. Novitech a.s. was the project coordinator with partners from Great Britain, Greece, and Romania.

Statistics of Income and Living Conditions (SILC)

The project was approved by the European Commission by the end of 2004 and is focused on the creation of a methodology, a software package, and the gathering of pilot statistics on income and living conditions in Slovakia. This solution will progressively be applied in other EU member states. At the beginning the project concentrates on information acquisition of poverty and social exclusion related by income distribution. Novitech a.s. is the project coordinator. Other consortium members are Slovak companies, such as Trexima, s.r.o. and Partner Soft, s.r.o.

On February 1, 2005, the contract was signed to start the SILC project execution. In 2005, all scheduled activities were completed together with all scheduled deliverables and reports designed and approved. Upon design and acceptance of the „Analysis and pilot survey proposal SILC“ Pilot survey, the survey was checked in the field. Concurrently, a pilot system was developed to verify the decentralised and centralised processing of the SILC statistic survey processing. Based on these results, evaluation reports on survey preparation, decentralised processing, and centralised processing were designed in conformity with the methodology required by the EU. As part of the project deliverables the corresponding parts of the technical project were also designed accordingto the methodology of the Slovak Office of Statistics.Thereby all conditions (methodology, organisation, software, and other) were realized to start executing the actual SILC survey. This survey was successfully carried out in Slovakia during the second half of 2005.

PROject Proposal ASSistance (PROPASS)

The goal of the project is the preparation, technical support, and provision of training for Slovak small and medium-sized enterprises to prepare and submit project proposals within the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission. Novitech Partner, s.r.o., part of the Novitech a.s. Group, is the project coordinator. The project is funded by the European Commission. In 2005, a series of successful information days took place in Nitra, Trenčín, and Vysoké Tatry – Stará Lesná, aimed at presenting the options and procedures for SMEs of how to gain financial aid from the European Commission. From among these participants several workshop attendees from Kosice, Bratislava, and Zilina, which fulfilled to certain criteria, were selected. Over 70 small and medium-sized enterprises took part in those information days.

EULobby.net (New dimension of portal solutions)

Visualisation of Novitech a.s.within the European Commission and European Parliament has been established through the creation of the European lobbying portal www.eulobby.net as a pilot on-line register of lobbying organisations and lobbyists. It is designed to assist EU clients prevailingly from new member states and facilitate the identification of lobbyists who can effectively promote the client's interests within EU institutions. The portal has caught the attention of many in EU circles for its contribution to openness, transparency and accountability.

Besides the implementation of the aforementioned projects, in 2005, Novitech a.s. and its subsidiaries have repeatedly involved human resources in calls of the European Commission to submit project proposals within diverse EU programmes as principal coordinator. Additionally the company participated in international tenders and submitted several bids (EIC LOT2 project, INONET project, ORGFARM project) during the second half of 2005. Our primary focus was pointed towards research and innovation projects of the FP6 and “electronic content” (eContent) programme. Next to this we offered expert services and resource capacities to IDA (Interchange Data Administration) as well as to other aid schemes of the European Commission.

We continued the provision and operation of our intelligent information portal www.euprojekt.sk. Through this portal, our employees and partners provided services which facilitated several project preparation and submission phases. Our EU project centre provides these services in premises located within Teledom, Timonova 27, Kosice.