Yet another challenging year for all of us as we battled through lock downs, stock shortages and weird weather conditions. It the midst of all this, the building supplies marketplace appears solid with reportedly a record year for many of our customers.
A few highlights I would like to share with you on Sterlands past year and our plans into 2022.
The year that was – 2021
New Customers
Sterland has signed up 9 new accounts in 2021. Not all are live on the system yet with four scheduled for implementation in early 2022.
Live in 2021:
Agquire Rural Holdings: an independent rural retail group based in WA
Dayle ITM: a multisite ITM buying group member located on the North Island of NZ
TOA ITM: a green fields ITM buying group member located on the North Island of NZ
Teds Electrical: an electrical supplies company and a Gemcell buying group member based in NSW.
M&B Sales: a multisite building supplies company in WA.
Scotts Plumbing: a single site plumbing supplies operation in SA.
Live in 2022:
Popes Electrical: a multisite electrical supplies company and a Gemcell buying group member based in the ACT
Bianco Construction and Industrial Supplies: a single site hardware business based in SA
Agnews Group: a multisite plumbing operation in VIC
Fernvale Produce M10: a single site M10 hardware and rural supplies business based in Fernvale QLD
Akka Consulting: another green fields ITM buying group member located on the North Island of NZ
We welcome all these new customers to the Sterland family.
Product Releases
2021 saw a massive development of Frameworks. We released 3 major versions 5.13, 5.14, and recently 6.0 and a further 22 minor patch releases. In total, more than 1000 individual items released. In addition to the ongoing support, development, and migration of functions to Frameworks, we introduced several new and exciting features to Frameworks, key highlights in 2021 were:
|
Item |
Version |
| Kits on the Fly – allowing users the ability to build a kit made up of a selection of different items at the time of keying a transaction | 5.13 |
| Scheduled invoice Output – New and improved functionality to schedule the sending/output of invoices to one or many email addresses per customer along with the ability to also output flat file invoices to suit 3rd party systems such as xero. | 5.13 |
| Windcave EFTPOS – A New EFTPOS solution moving to an API integrated solution through Windcave | 5.14 |
| Frameworks Mobile – Enhancements made to the mobile Frameworks UI to allow for greater usability, visibility, and improved performance on all devices. | 5.14 |
| Future Pricing in Contracts – Implementation of future dated pricing within contracts along with an efficient review process allows for contracts to be defined for longer periods with agreed price review dates. | 5.14 |
| Production Dashboard – to improve visibility and capacity planning to the Product system | 6.0 |
| 3rd Party Integration – including Scandit for mobile device scanning, SLYP to enable the texting of receipts to your customers, ZipPay for customer payment options plus many others through our growing API’s | 5.14 – 6.0 |
Frameworks rollout
We now have almost 60% of the full user base using Frameworks with 85% of our accounts now upgraded to the Framework environment. With more than 75 additional ProStix elements converted to Frameworks over the last 12 months, for most a move to Frameworks closes out any requirement to use ProStix. We will continue to work with all our customers to manage their upgrade and take advantage of the functionality and features of Frameworks.
AWS Readiness
Late this year we completed the development and deployment of Frameworks to the AWS Cloud platform. We have our first two customers up and operational and once these “beta” customers settle we’ll promote more details of the environment.
Staff Changes
Like all businesses 2021 has seen a few staff changes in the last 12 months. We have increased our staffing levels across all areas including development, consulting, support, and testing. Coming on board this year were:
- Dan Stoodley – Support Team Leader
- Jake McClean –Technical Documentation
- Tim Anders – Junior Consultant
- John Nankervis – Analyst Programmer
- Caitlin McLennan – Administration Support
- Ananna Jahid – Testing
- Ashmita Devi (Fiji based) – Testing
- Zak Lang – IT Trainee
The year to come – 2022
Frameworks Roadmap
2022 will see another two major releases of Frameworks, 6.1 (currently targeted for April) and 6.2 (currently targeted for October). The focus for the first quarter of next year is to close out many older issues and deliver on key usability improvements through the high-volume transaction areas of the system. We will release several exciting new features into the application including:
- Financial Reporting – New functionality within Frameworks to build financial reports for interactive viewing with drilldown capability.
- Document Management – the enhancement of our document attachment area to allow offsite storage, approval workflow, integrated OCR and enhanced document storage capability
- Tradeportal V2 – The new Tradeportal user interface provides a modern look and feel along with a responsive design allowing for full Tradeportal functionality to be accessed by your customers on any sized device
- Flexible Debtor payment terms – new methodology for setting customer payment terms that can be altered on a transaction by transaction basis by authorised users therefore allowing for extended terms to be offered on particular transactions
- PO Cost Adders – adds the ability to define extra charges that can be automatically added to purchase orders and stock receipts meeting certain defined criteria.
User Groups and Web Training Sessions
We are continuing to enhance our communication and engagement with customers. We have scheduled User Group events including the Enterprise User Group, NZ User Group and 3 focused events on specific application areas. In addition, we will continue to run twice monthly webinars which will act as educational events on areas of the application that are either receiving a lot of support calls or have advanced features we feel would be of benefit to the community.
All these events will be publicized through the SKB webinars page and via Newsletter https://skb.sterland.com:8443/display/public/FRAM/Frameworks+-+Focus+Topic+Webinars.
Christmas Wishes
All of us here at Sterland would like to wish you and your family our warmest wishes this Christmas.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our clients and partners for their continued support throughout a hugely different and challenging 2021.
We hope that the New Year sees your home filled with laughter, love and good health.