As we wrap up another year its time to share some of our achievements and celebrate having new customers join the Abel community.
This Year’s Highlights
In February Callum Baird was promoted to Software Development Manager of Abel’s Research & Development Centre. Callum is responsible for our software engineers and Abel’s Technology & Functional Roadmap. This team moved into their new office space in March.
During April we attended the Abel worldwide meeting held in Salt Lake City. Alsco executives attended from seven countries. This meeting coincided with Abel’s 5.7 Release.
In August, Allan and I visited Australian Wool Testing Authority in Melbourne. We were also delighted to be among the Finalists in the American Chamber of Commerce DHL Express Success and Innovation Awards. It was the 50th anniversary of AMCHAM’s presence in New Zealand. See August’s Roundup for details.
Early in December we hosted a series of meetings for Alsco Senior Management in New Zealand. We took them sailing on an Americas Cup Yacht on the Waitemata Harbour, it was a great day. We sailed at a brisk 11 knots, with lots of boat creaking and nervous smiles all round!
From left: Larry Tomsic, Cory Nielson, Jane Mattsen, Steven Passey, Courtney Pond, Allan Baird, Paul Charlson and Callum Baird
Our Distributor and Implementation partner Abel Solutions has had a great year with Abel ERP implementations on both sides of the Tasman.
We are delighted to have Ausplastics, Fero, Destination Sinton, Hydroworks, Westervelt Company NZ, Pure Bottling NZ and Dairy Products NZ join the Abel community. I would especially like to thank David Mills and his team for all their work with the rollout of Abel into Deane Apparel, who is New Zealand’s largest marketer of uniforms, corporate work wear and farm clothing. Deane Apparel was established in the 1930’s (with sites located in Christchurch, Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne). Deane initially manufactured work wear and school clothing in its Christchurch factory. By the end of 1950s Deane had established itself as New Zealand’s leading work wear and farm clothing brand with its overalls and work jeans reaching iconic status. In the early 1990s the company diversified into uniforms and corporate wardrobes. Deane Apparel supplies innovative clothing solutions to many of New Zealand’s most high-profile brands.
Our Research & Development Centre released more new features and functionality this year including:
Abel Enterprise Management
The Abel Enterprise Management suite provides the ability to run multiple business entities on independent databases, while still providing consolidated views of financial performance across multiple countries and currencies at all levels of your organization.
- Enterprise Financial Management
- Inter-Database Trading
- Multi-Database Tax Consolidation
- Inter-Database Banking
- Centralized Accounts Payable
- Remote Receipts & Payments
- Inter-Database Navigation
- Enterprise Reporting
Customer Relationship Management Enhancements
Abel’s CRM has been enhanced with significant new features for managing the sales cycle.
A new suite of screens for entering leads, converting leads to opportunities (which in turn automatically create the Client and Contact records), managing and maintaining opportunities and recording outcomes.
Executive Dashboards
Our new dashboard screens help senior staff track their Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) and manage by exception, especially highlighting work that is late.
Enhancements to Tracking
We have made some enhancements to the Barcodes architecture used for Abel’s Batch, Serial and Unique Tracking capabilities.
Tracks (Batches, Serials and Uniques) have a number of new options available for validating document lines dealing with tracked stock.
We have extended Abel’s Bins and Batches functionality by adding Tanks and Grades. Abel’s new Tank functionality represents actual equipment in a factory e.g. tanks, vats, wine barrels, silos etc. Tank functionality is intended for those installations that need to trace the factory equipment (tanks) that a product was processed through, and also which batches of product have been through a particular tank.
Grades help installations that deal with both new and used items, enabling them to classify items as new or used (with various grades of used condition).
Improvements to Traceability
Abel now provides a new Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) data structure to capture radio frequency identification chips and also enables RFID to be attached to serial number tracking.
Tax Enhancements
For indirect taxes (GST, VAT, Sales Tax)
We have introduced new tax features that make it easier to access data and generate reports.
The following areas have been enhanced:
- Generating tax journals / tax returns.
- Reporting adjustments to prior month’s data.
- Identifying the tax transactions that make up the tax totals for each tax code (making the tax data easier to audit).
- We have also added support for Malaysian GST.
The new tax structure is also useful for those Abel installations that report to multiple tax jurisdictions, helping them to more easily produce returns / reports for different tax sub-codes.
As always, we continue to work alongside our customers to make sure Abel meets their evolving business needs.
A big thank-you to our fabulous software engineers and support staff who come to work each day empowered to create the best ERP solution for growing businesses. The photo below shows our team on a recent outing.
To all our customers around the world, thank you 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