What a year it’s been !
COVID-19 has had an unprecedented effect on all of us: on our businesses, our families and our communities. We’d like to acknowledge that many are still bearing the effects of COVID-19 both personally and economically, so Christmas and the New Year may be especially difficult for some this year. We’re thinking of you and our best wishes go to you, to your businesses and your families.
We’ve seen some positives that have grown out of our collective response to COVID-19. Thanks to technology, we have all found new ways of working remotely and also working virtually with our Customers. We’ve appreciated your willingness to adapt so we can continue our work and minimize the impact for all of us.
Customer News
This year we’ve been busy with new business across a range of industries including Manufacturing, Engineering, Joinery, Insulation and Health Supplements. Highlights for us have included two remote implementations in Auckland in April and a fully remote implementation in Perth during July.
We’ve also undertaken major projects with existing customers, helping them adopt more of Abel’s functionality, and to adapt to the COVID-19 business environment, including:
- Weighing, Dispensing and Consumption processes for diary and pharmaceutical customers
- Interfaces with testing laboratories to import test results and store them against batches in Abel
- Manufacturing, packing and pallet closure processes
- Abel Mobile Warehouse App for Android®
- Abel Mobile Sales App for Android and iOS®
- Centralized warehousing with additional reorder and MRP replenish processes
- MPI Transfer EDs, Manufacturing EDs and Export EDs for animal product movements
- Improved visibility of goods on ships
- Greater uptake of BI management reporting with our partner, Virtual BI
There are positive signs that trading patterns are adapting to COVID-19, online trading is up for many of our customers and some have reported a three-fold increase their global EDI traffic.
Read about some of Abel’s processes in our blogs on Inter Branch Stock Transfers, Manufacturing Quality Processes and Bulk Picking.
It’s always interesting to see the many and varied ways our customers are using Abel ERP to make a difference in their businesses. You can read about some of them on our case study page.
Plant News from Callum Baird
This year our Software Development team released Abel Version 6.2.
Some notable mentions are:
- New Menu framework that supports multiple menu layouts (Finance, Manufacturing etc)
- Abel Mobile Sales app
- Abel Mobile Warehouse app
- Construction Industry Retentions and Payment Claims
- Batch allocation, enabling early planning of raw materials that have variable composition
- Interfaces for mobile expense recording and time recording (Expensify®, TSheets®)
- Enhancements to SQL export framework
- Support for Snowflake® cloud Data Warehouse
To find out more about the new features in Version 6.2, please contact us.
We’ve had two new people join the team this year (Rajive in Auckland and Peter in Christchurch). Rajive joined us the day before the first lockdown and Peter joined us during it!
We’ve had a full-on year and we’ve got a bunch of new stuff lined up for Abel ERP in 2021.
Other News
In February we opened our Hamilton office headed by Charlie Hancy, who relocated from Auckland. This gives us a local presence close to our growing customer base in the Waikato, Bay of Plenty and nearby regions.
We’ve welcomed new staff to our development and support teams this year. They’re all making a great contribution to Abel’s products, implementation, delivery and our customer support. To all our staff, thank you for your contribution and dedication this year.
To all our customers, thank you for your loyalty and for your business. We wish you and your families a safe and happy festive season, and we look forward to working with you again next year.
Jane and the Team at Abel
To find out more about Abel ERP and how it can help your business, please contact us.