This article was published in November 2018 and covered the third call for applications to Japan's IT Implementation Subsidy (final deadline: 18 December 2018). What the subsidy covers, the subsidy rate and the application periods change from year to year, so please check the IT Implementation Subsidy official site for current information.
Quartile has become a registered implementation support provider for the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry's Service Productivity Improvement IT Implementation Support Programme, the "IT Implementation Subsidy", and Odoo is now registered as an IT tool under it.
For an outline of the IT Implementation Subsidy programme, see this leaflet.
Software, cloud usage fees, implementation-related costs and the like can be subsidised within a range of ¥500,000 maximum, ¥150,000 minimum, at a subsidy rate of up to one half — so if you are a small or medium-sized company interested in our Odoo services, we hope you will consider making use of it.
The final deadline for the third call is 18 December 2018.
As an aside, I thought the various application procedures for the IT Implementation Subsidy leave considerable room for improvement.
Registering as an implementation support provider and getting the IT tool listed took a fair while to get through review.
The provider registration went through smoothly, but for the IT tool our application came back with requested revisions about three times before it was finally accepted.
Because Odoo has features covering every industry, we submitted the application with almost all of the selectable features and supported industries ticked. The reviewers seemed to hold a preconception, or a checkpoint, along the lines of "an IT tool should be narrowed down to some extent in its features and industries" — and it came back for reasons that cannot be read out of the application guidelines at all, such as "too many features means it is treated as a general-purpose tool and will not pass review".
We did get the tool registered in the end by narrowing the scope, but since you can apparently apply for a subsidy award even for features and industries not selected at registration, there seems little need to spend that effort on registration and screen it in advance against opaque criteria.
A mechanism for checking outcomes is necessary, but the present approach — pouring large costs into a process like pre-screening, which generates little value in itself — strikes me as inefficient. Beyond the cost to the reviewers, the applicant side must be spending a substantial amount on the work of getting through review, second-guessing poorly understood criteria included. (Which is precisely why consulting on subsidy applications works as a business.)
Given all that, I imagine some small and medium-sized companies and IT service providers that genuinely want to focus on raising productivity through IT decide not to take part in this scheme, or not to use it (an odd thing to say in a post announcing the subsidy, I realise).
Cover Photo by Alain Pham on Unsplash
Japan's IT Implementation Subsidy can be used for adopting Odoo