Isabel, 21, and a 25-home development.
While David kept a senior role at a private company and fought to push the small Davisa forward, Isabel was 100 % immersed in her family's construction business. Both had studied Business Computing. For that reason it was impossible for them to imagine a company without a solid integrated management system.
That's how dvproject was born. They started building it on top of a Microsoft ERP called Navision at the time. What obsessed Isabel was being able to see the whole project on a single screen: certify, invoice, drill down into costs… keep everything under control.
At 21, Isabel took on a 25-home development commissioned by her father, with the requirement to pay him back for the land at 9 % interest, as if it were a loan. Not a symbolic figure. A real loan that had to be repaid.
She learned to walk on roof tiles.
Mornings in the office, afternoons on site. Cleaning tiles. Cutting bricks. Measuring with her father and brother. Carrying tools up to the roof. She learned to walk on roof tiles without breaking them. All with one goal: to understand construction from the inside.
In the first meetings with suppliers she used to hear sentences like: "But how many times have you actually been on a site?". The site was the answer. That experience changed the way dvproject was built: the ERP had to reflect the day-to-day reality, automate what could be automated, and never accept a single data point without cross-checking it in the system.
«Not a single data point was accepted without cross-checking it in the system.»
Project and manufacturing: less different than they seemed.
Over time we realised projects and manufacturing had much more in common than they appeared from the outside. Best practices from one applied to the other. That cross-pollination turned Davisa into a partner able to build three large verticals (dvproject, dvproduction, dvlogistic) and, from them, smaller specialised extensions when the scale justified it.
The technology was always Microsoft. The decision to become a Microsoft partner was early and deliberate: Microsoft's infrastructure, support, release cadence and certifying discipline were (and still are) the most reliable ground to build on.
23 years on we're still Davisa.
Several acquisition offers have arrived in these two decades. We've turned them down. Accepting an acquisition means losing the essence of Davisa: respect for the sector, respect for competitors, passion for the worlds we help with technology.
Today, our children — also computer engineers — work with us. dvproject keeps evolving every 2-3 months on the rhythm of Business Central's official waves. The philosophy is the same as when Isabel was cutting bricks on site: the system must truly be your single source of truth.