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2012 has been a big year for simPRO with big changes to our product lineup as well as to the company’s focus and management team.
The completion and commercial release of simPRO Enterprise Version 11 was a huge milestone in 2012. Written completely from scratch, V11 was the culmination of about 3 years work and an investment of close to $2million in development. This has set a solid foundation for ongoing development and innovation in our software for years to come.
The rollout process to V11 has been slower than we had originally anticipated with around a third of our client base currently live on V11. This delay has been mostly due to the additional time allocated for clients to fully explore and test V11 with a copy of their own data before moving to a live V11 build.
For all those clients that came onto the Beta testing program for V11 earlier in the year, a big THANK YOU from the simPRO team and the simPRO community for your efforts. Your work at quickly identifying and reporting bugs was invaluable in helping us get the system to a stable, commercial release as quickly as we did.
Part of the success of simPRO Enterprise V11 can also be attributed to large corporates here and in the UK, including national & international brands and Fortune 500 companies who are rolling simPRO Enterprise into their operating divisions.
A big focus of the business in the later part of this year and going into 2013 is the restructuring of the simPRO Support Centre. We are increasing the numbers of people we have in the support team in order to keep up with the huge growth in clients we have experienced in the past few years. At times in the past we haven’t managed to maintain the ratio of support staff to clients needed for simPRO to deliver the level of service that we want to deliver to you. So we have been hiring extensively in the past few months and have also engaged an experienced support centre manager who just so happens to also be an experienced simPRO trainer.
In addition we will be introducing a new support system in the new year which, amongst it’s many new features, allows you to effectively monitor your open tickets and view the history of your tickets and their resolution. We hope that this helps make the support process more transparent and cements simPRO’s position as provider of the best support in the industry.
The other big changes that simPRO underwent this year were changes to the management team. In September our long term CEO Nolan LeSueur stepped down as CEO and resigned from the board to consider other pursuits. The board, management and staff thank Nolan for his tireless work in helping develop simPRO into the great product it is now and for opening up many opportunities and markets for the company to succeed. We wish him every success for the future in his new endeavours.
I was appointed as CEO in September and have been given the opportunity to guide the company through some tough economic times while simultaneously developing our product range for a competitive future where we take simPRO into additional markets such as Europe and the USA. For those of you who don’t know me and want to know a little more, please visit my LinkedIn profile and feel free to connect.
So what’s coming up in 2013? Like every year, it’s all about product development and new feature releases:
- simPRO Enterprise V11.2 will be released in January and will have some great new features.
- V11.3 is currently in the planning phases and we are looking at completely overhauling the scheduling process to help streamline the operations there and make it sing for those of you that schedule high volume service jobs.
- The simPRO Mobile Connect App is currently in V2 and we are working on a V2.1 release with JSAs (customisable safety audits) early in the new year and planning on a V3 with new designs and enhanced workflows and the ability to run on Windows 8 mobile devices.
- The simPRO Enterprise Fire platform is being reworked with the just released AS1851-2012 standards. We aim to have the new log book/forms designed for this new standard by mid January. Once completed we will be working on bringing the templates up to the standard as well.
In addition, we’ll be releasing a range of new products in 2013 including:
- eForms, a replacement for our digital pen platform which allows forms to be loaded and completed on tablets and integrated to simPRO. Anything that is a paper form will be able to be loaded to a tablet device and integrated to simPRO.
- We are also developing another tier of simPRO Job Management Software that will fit clients where simPRO Enterprise might be too big or complex. This is slated for release around mid year.
So from all the team at simPRO Software, we wish you a happy and safe holiday period and look forward to supporting you and your business throughout 2013.
Will the simPRO Connect APP also work on Windows 8 tablets (eg F5v) in January 2013?
Hi Gaynor,
At this stage we don’t have an ETA on Connect App running on Windows 8. We utilise a cross platform development tool that allows us to create apps that run on the different operating systems like iOS, Android and Windows. At this stage they haven’t confirmed when they will be able to support Windows 8, but they are working on it at the moment.
As soon as it is released to us we will then work yo output the Connect App to Windows 8 and Windows 8 RTM (so it will work on laptops and devices like the F5V as well as tablets and phones).
We do have a browser based mobile system as an alternative to the Connect App that your could run on the F5V – but this doesn’t have the full depth of features of the Connect App nor can it run offline like the Connect App.
Contact simPRO support for any further details.
Thanks.
Will the Simpro Mobile system include in the future as standard the ability to send the completed job cards to the client directly on completion of the job thereby replacing the paper copy that the technician would normally have left behind? And if so, when does Simpro expect to have such a facility in place and available for use?
Hi John,
This is more a function from within the simPRO Enterprise system than the Connect App itself.
We don’t really have any plans to do that as a standard feature at this stage as I have been told that we have only once had this done as a customisation. The customisation that was done took the job description (notes), materials used, labour and the pricing and created that into a PDF job sheet that was e-mailed to the client.
If you wanted to get this added as a feature request then please do via the simPRO Community Feature Request area in V11 and if we have a few other people agree that would be a good feature then we can look at getting it added into the standard product, or alternately you could get that done as a customised form.
The alternative is in the upcoming eForms where the job sheet can be on a tablet which is filled in by your technicians (with signatures etc) and once submitted that can send the form as a PDF to the client. This sending of the PDF will be a standard feature of eForms, so that might be a good one. We are hoping to have that available around February – March 2013, so watch out for our communications around then.
Thanks.
To the new CEO of simPRO,
Will your team ever get back to us on the issue we have been having with our invoicing. We have requested for the last 5 months an add on for Labour Breakdown so the client can see the hours worked and what the employee has done while on the job. It is appalling the lack of response that you and your team have given our company. We are at such a loss we have expressed to fellow customers not to change over to V11 and the new change over system that you have put in place is a budget cutting rip off for your customers. All i can ask is would the previous CEO let this happen.
Hi Ronald,
I’m sorry to hear about your disappointment with our service. Like all businesses we try and keep everyone happy and don’t like to see clients that are struggling with issues.
I had our support manager check out all the tickets and enquiries on this matter and we found that you had a ticket from 11 weeks ago asking us about the labour summary report that was in V10 and that is not in V11. I believe that in that ticket we replied that we don’t currently have a time frame for replacing that report (it needed to be reworked considerably to make it a relevant & meaningful report). I’ll follow up on that over the next day or 2 and ensure that we can give you a better answer.
I’m not quite sure what you mean by a `budget cutting rip off’ considering this has been a 3 year project with a $2 million development investment. The overwhelming feedback from our client base has been that simPRO Enterprise V11 is a great advancement in usability. The thing to keep in mind with V11 is that it creates a great platform for future development as it replaces a lot of legacy issues we faced with a 10 year old system and database. Now that we have gotten to the finish line with the base development, we now have the room and the platform to build all the other features and functions that we want to deliver into our user base.
I’ll get in touch with some more answers with your other enquiry.
Thanks.
Hello Brad.
Will the JSA/QA’s be included on the Connect v2 app that is coming out this month? I just printed off the v2 mobile user guide and it lists that it is ‘coming soon’?
Hi Gaynor,
It certainly will.
This release was lodged with Apple iTunes this week. Apple takes anywhere from 7 days to a couple of weeks to review the App before it allows it to be released to the App Store.
As soon as we get confirmation that it is approved on the App Store, we push out an update on the simPRO Enterprise system to apply the new JSA/QA update and we then also release it to the Google Play Store for Android devices.
So with a bit of luck we may see it this coming week, if not it will likely be the following week, but it’s in Apple’s hands right now.
Cheers,
Brad