CIRCUIT – Circular IT: Extending the useful life of digital assets in European SMEs

European SMEs increasingly invest in software without exploiting most of its capabilities, creating a gap between digital spending and actual productivity. ERP is now the most widely adopted business software in the EU (Eurostat, 2025), yet adopting is not leveraging: companies use only 49% of the licences they buy (Zylo, 2024), and ERP systems run with many modules never activated after implementation. This "digital waste" carries economic, material and energy costs, and today SMEs have no way to measure it. Instead of using what they already own, they keep buying more technology.

CIRCUIT addresses this by developing and validating a self-diagnosis app for digital waste. The app autonomously analyses real software usage, distinguishing what is actively used from what remains idle, and identifies paid but underutilised capacities: dormant ERP modules, unconfigured functions and overlapping tools. From usage data it calculates economic savings, estimates material and energy impacts using reference factors, and generates a roadmap for each SME to reactivate existing technology and avoid purchases that duplicate functionalities.

The project builds on diagnostic logic already validated in real-world pilots with three rural micro-SMEs in the dental sector in Spain, where existing digital capacities were reactivated instead of adding new software, achieving measured direct savings (up to 4% of annual turnover in one case) and eliminating redundant tools and paper. The project's aim is to prove this result is replicable in another country and another sector, raising the technology from TRL 6 to TRL 8.

The consortium currently includes FLIA Business Control (Extremadura, ES), a small analytics company that owns the diagnostic logic and leads the technical core and exploitation, and Escuela21 (Vienna, AT), experienced in European project coordination.

We seek a third partner in Greece or Innlandet (Norway) operating with a vertical, sector-specific ERP, in a professional-services sector other than healthcare (architecture, engineering, law, consulting). Profiles: an SME up to 50 employees (eligible in Norway), or a business association or cluster (eligible in Greece or Norway) that validates the diagnosis in its own organisation and can involve companies from its network. The partner applies the diagnosis in itself, becoming the first case demonstrating circularity in a new sector and territory, and leads pilots and impact assessment in its region.