As we wrap up another year it’s time to share some of our achievements and celebrate having new customers join the Abel community.
This Year’s Highlights:
In February, Abel Software was delighted to achieve Investors in People accreditation, an internationally recognized accreditation in people management, from High Performance Centre.
In March we celebrated Abel’s 20th Birthday.
In June some of us were fortunate to escape the cold of winter and spend time in North America where Abel Enterprise Management was implemented into the Corporate Office of Alsco Inc, a worldwide leader in the rental of linen, uniforms, healthcare garments, and washroom services and products.
This has been a great year for Abel Solutions, our Distributor and implementation partner, with Abel implementations in Australia and New Zealand. We are very pleased to have: Austin Engineering, Devex Systems, NZ Drinks, King Honey, Playground Centre, New Zealand Health Manufacturing, and ZiwiPeak join the Abel community.
Client Services Manager of NZPICS Vishnu Rayapeddi (left) meets David Mills of Abel Solutions (right).
November saw NZPICS hold its Supply Chain Conference in Auckland. NZPICS are the New Zealand premier Channel Partner for APICS, the worldwide organization for Supply Chain Management and research. Abe Eshkenazi, Chief Executive Officer of APICS USA, gave the keynote address.
Our Continuous Improvement programme and adherence to APICS best practice standards delivers ongoing results for more Abel customers each year. Andrew and Alison Turner from Nautech Electronics share their story.
In other news, our Research & Development Centre released more new features and functionality this year. We are always looking for new ways to improve Abel and to meet specific customer needs. Here are some highlights:
Manufacturing Functionality:
- We extended Abel’s MRP (Material Requirements Planning) to include Activities e.g. spraying a kiwifruit orchard – showing when the chemicals, equipment and labour will be required for each activity.
- We have also extended the use of Abel’s “Shop Order” functionality so you can use it to group existing orders for efficiency in the plant.
- We have introduced an option for Batch or Unique tracked stock to be consumed at actual cost of the tracked items (rather than at the average stock price).
Customer Story: Mathew Metcalf CEO of Dairy Products NZ Limited explains how Abel’s manufacturing is helping his company deliver automation, flexibility and quality control.
Report Writer Enhancements:
This year our report writer has undergone several significant enhancements:
- Export to Microsoft® Excel® enables you to export multiple reports to a multi-tabbed Excel workbook e.g. one worksheet per branch.
- Ranking reports enable businesses to easily compare the financial performance of various branches within a company. They can rank different branches in order of a statistical comparison that you specify. For example, Office Supplies compared to Total Revenue
- New benchmark line feature prints a line across a report at a “benchmark” value that you specify to highlight data that is above or below expectations.
- Conditional formatting which enables you to alter the format of groups, lines or fields on a report depending on the value in a field. It works for both printed reports and Excel exports. For example under performance can be highlighted in red.
- Multiple reports that run in one run for printing or export to Excel. When used with Excel exports, this feature creates an Excel workbook with multiple tabs – one tab for each report within the Multi Report. Multi Reports can be scheduled in the same way as Abel’s other reports.
Abel Enterprise Management:
We have continued to expand Abel’s Enterprise Management functionality this year.
New Dashboards:
We have introduced more Executive Dashboards for tracking KPIs and managing by exception. Our new dashboards include:
Customer Overview dashboard enables you to:
- View Customers Orders, Invoices, Returns and Credit Limit
- View Aged Balances, Pay Days and Sales History
- View Triple A Rating and Contact Details,
- View and Create Notes, Events and Tasks.
- View recent customer order details for the last 3, 6, 12 or 24 months
- Create new Customer Orders.
Customer Rating screen for ranking your Customers by Revenue, Profit and how quickly they pay you. The Customer Rating screen helps you understand which customers are contributing the most value to your business.
Manufacturing Work Center Loadings screen that shows work center capacity and loading in a graphical form. The Work Center Loadings dashboard shows you which work centers in your factory are over capacity and which ones are under capacity for the next 10 days.
Some of the Abel Team at a recent Planning Day
As always, we continue to work alongside our customers to make sure Abel meets their evolving business needs.
Thank you so much to our dedicated software engineers and support staff for their efforts again this year, I am very proud of what we have achieved this year.
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