32 | Sector Focus: Software
◄ “Enhancements to the stock taking function break the yard down so you can count in the different locations that a product may be held,” said Mr Oldrey. “And purchase invoice matching is one of those things that is relatively straightforward for some businesses, but timber companies need to be a bit cannier. The software needs to be able to say, ‘this is close to what we originally ordered, rather than an exact match – is that actually correct?’. It needs to work smarter.” Epicor also reports success with its software updates, including to its Warehouse Management (WMS) option, which supports order picking.
“It has been a strong growth area and remains a popular choice for suitable customers,” said Adam Lee. “We’ve enhanced it multiple times this year, now supporting timber packs and variable width (hardwood) picking processes. We’ve also harmonised the architecture within our Azure MSSQL offering. BisTrack WMS complements the BisTrack core software, removes complexity and improves ease of use and access to data. We also provide a suite of simpler inventory solutions delivered as mobile apps to suit various customer needs and budgets.” BisTrack has frequent new releases throughout the year, driven by product management processes that rely heavily on customer input, especially through its Customer Advisory Council and the Epicor Ideas portal. “We’ve recently welcomed two UK customers to the council – Bradfords Building Supplies and James Latham Ltd,” said Mr Lee. “Both attended our global customer event, Insights, in Nashville, joining 900 other like-minded folks. BisTrack has a comprehensive three-year roadmap that includes hundreds of smaller software improvements as well as bigger ticket AI-led initiatives and integrations with our portfolio products – such as smart forecasting software for inventory optimisation – and third-
party specialist products, such as Transport Management options from Trimble.” The company’s Automation Studio, which gives customers the ability to connect with other software programs with little or no IT coding needed, has had widespread impact, added Mr Lee.
“The ability to integrate and automate processes that are outside of the boundaries of the core BisTrack coverage remains a key topic for Epicor and transitioning BisTrack to a full web-based product and enabling a comprehensive suite of APIs (application programming interfaces) is an ongoing journey,” he said. “We expect the Automation Studio for BisTrack to be available later this year or early next. “We’ve pivoted some of our development capacity to create better tools to help our UK customers accessing and upgrading to the latest SaaS (software as a service) versions,” added Mr Lee. “This move to SaaS ensures that BisTrack becomes evergreen software for those customers, meaning updates and access to the future capabilities – including AI features and the Automation Studio – will integrate seamlessly and naturally into their operations upon request at no extra cost.” Meanwhile, Ten-25 has just taken the platform on which Merchanter is written up a generation, rolling it out from the beginning of July.
“It’s going to open up some exciting things for the product offer in the future,” said Mr Oldrey. “It’s going to make it a lot easier to have mobile apps as part of the system and the first one we’re doing is a driver delivery app.
“There are also going to be stock taking apps, rep apps and moving on to customer- facing apps,” he said. “These will be ones where customers can place and track their own orders and so on from mobile devices.” Improved security, such as two factor authentication will also be available.
“The more secure we can make data while still making systems accessible and easy for the people who should be using it to use, then so much the better,” said Mr Oldrey. “A whole programme of improvements are going to start to come through – there’ll be some cool stuff there.”
KCS is rolling out a new version of K8 on the latest global platform. “We’ve deployed it now in the UK in about 30% of our customer base, with more following,” said Mr Mitchell. “We also release monthly updates to this product, with some incremental changes.
“It really benefits from our global R&D resources. For example, one feature we’re bringing into K8 is an offline point of sale capability, which will be launched later this summer. What this gives our customers is the ability to still trade in the branch even if they have lost access from the point of sale to their server. So, if the network connection is down, you can still transact with your customer. This offline capability is synced with K8, so customers’ prices and terms and so on are all synced. There’s no disruption as far as the customer being served at the counter is concerned and, when connectivity is restored, it replays the transaction log to the main server, so no manual uploading of any transactions is necessary. “We’ve developed that capability for some of our markets where communications are not so robust, in particular, South Africa and Canada,” said Mr Mitchell. “South Africa, because the economy is volatile and there are things like power savings, or load shedding, that force power cuts in different parts of the country, which can affect connectivity to cloud systems. And in Canada there are times when communications start failing because of very poor weather conditions. “Another feature we will introduce is customer facing displays in store, so rich product content such as images and specifications can be easily shared with
Above left: Ten-25’s Merchanter has a lot of functionality, some of which is customer specific Above right: Ryan Osborne joined Ten-25 as system implementation and project manager last December
TTJ | July/August 2024 |
www.ttjonline.com
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