A Letter from Collette Convery, Managing Director
2023 has flown by despite it being a challenging year for most businesses. Companies have had to cope with high inflation, rising cost of sale and operating expenses, and a shortage of people to fill vacancies in the UK workforce.
Against this backdrop, we have been trying to expand the Catalyst business to meet the needs of our customers, the OEMs and our strategic investment in product infrastructure. This can require some juggling skills, something I am sure you all must contend with.
Our greatest challenge is meeting demand for changes and updates, so we intend to speed up delivery time on future projects by investing in the use of modern programming languages and tools. To introduce these into Platinum we have been transforming the underlying infrastructure of the product. This will make it easier to deliver new features and simpler to support.
Platinum is a product that is flexible and easy to use. Implementation timescales for Platinum are considerably lower than the industry standard for a business system. However, we want to ensure that we maintain a great user experience so we have invested in specialist design resource to support our ongoing feature development programme. The objective is to minimise the need for training and documentation. We know user documentation and release notes aren’t always an exciting read, but sometimes we do need to convey information to explain new features. Our new Publications Manager is busy transforming the way we relay this information to you, our aim is to make it interesting, and both fast and easy to absorb.
Throughout 2023 we have been working with the manufacturers and suppliers to deliver new integrations intended to make your interactions with them more efficient. Here are some examples of what we have worked on:
- Polaris data feed
- Honda Composite Report
- Changes to HMRC vehicle reports
- Fiserve Clover payment card terminal updates
- Payroll updates
- Platinum Online enhancements including the ability to use this offline.
In 2024 we have a number of projects lined up for development, these include:
- Autotrader integration enhancements
- Royal Enfield integration
- Customer/Supplier screen enhancements
- 2024 payroll changes
In addition, we will soon launch Platinum Online checklist features. You can see these new features in our upcoming webinar on 14th December. One key feature is to allow you to create checklists specific to your business processes, for example, Health and Safety checklists or vehicle handover checklists.
We are also reviewing the backlog of customer raised issues and ideas with a plan to update and publish a roadmap to customers in the new year.
As ever, we are very interested in your feedback in terms of ideas for future changes and additions, early adopter programme participation, beta release involvement, Customer Advisory Board participation, NPS surveys and support ticket surveys. If you have more general feedback that you would like to discuss, feel free to contact me.