In what feels like the blink of an eye, another year has come and gone! While it only feels like yesterday that we were shaking off the cobwebs of 2015 and preparing our 2016, on reflection aXcelerate has managed to make some significant changes and developments during this time.
Our aXcelerate team has grown considerably over the last year. aXcelerate have implemented a traineeship program and as part of this, we have two new trainee’s Blair and Finn to help with our aXcelerate support team and gradually build their knowledge of the system. Our implementation team has grown exponentially so that we can effectively manage the training needs of our new clients and we have hired another data migration specialist Jake, to help ensure clients can migrate their data as efficiently as possible. We have also welcomed our new Operations Manager Andrew, who will be assisting both Reay and Julie with strategic direction and the day-to-day running of aXcelerate.
Having a greater number of resources at our disposal has meant that aXcelerate can apply greater focus to all areas of the business. A particular area and one that is significantly important to aXcelerate is client engagement. This year aXcelerate have developed a dedicated Customer Success team in order to further uphold our H.E.A.R.T values. Customer Success are responsible for resolving any issues that may come up for a particular client and to ensure that there’s always open and clear dialogue between the team and our client base. To achieve this, the Customer Success team have been focusing on touching base with all clients regularly throughout the year and you’ll no doubt hear from them frequently in 2017.
In addition to our added client touch points, our developers have been very busy this year implementing new features into aXcelerate. There have been many updates throughout 2016. One of these were the updates made to our calendar feature which has improved the functionality of scheduling events and workshops into aXcelerate. This updated feature now allows you to efficiently manage your schedule throughout the day, week and month across a variety of views such as; Trainers, Rooms and Equipment. It also has filters and a live Timeline feature so you can quickly and easily track down your events throughout the day.
Developments were also made to the Finance Management User Interface this year, in order to provide clients with a cleaner look and allow for easier navigation. A lot of the workflows were changed in order to reduce the number of clicks to achieve transaction outcomes, particularly in relation to credit notes and offsets against invoices. This overall, has made performing many of the financial tasks within aXcelerate a lot more efficient.
aXcelerate have also spent some time this year making developments to our comprehensive assessments functionality so that the overall management of student assessment is as effective and thorough as possible. The feature now ensures Assessment evidence related to units of competency is easily uploaded and both assessors and students are instantly notified when each assessment piece has been uploaded and marked. RTOs can also now set maximum submission attempts at both the class and student level and include a range of different filter and display fields to monitor student assessment progress.
2016 also marked the first year of our completed integration with WordPress, which allows all of our clients who use the popular WordPress CMS, to have this information ‘talk’ and feed through to aXcelerate. Some of our clients have already begun to utilise this integration and we look forward to building more advanced functionality into our WordPress plugins in 2017.
As the year draws to a close, we are already constructing our goals for 2017 and have some exciting projects planned. 2016 will see a returned focus to training and to providing additional tutorial resources to clients, so they have added support when trying out new features within the system or ‘refreshing’ their memory in areas they haven’t used in awhile. This will include the return of our fortnightly webinars and our aXcelerate Training academy. The number of Client Forums, which were rolled out regularly this year across our three office bases, will continue to be held next year. We aim to roll these forums out more regularly and extend them to include both Perth and Adelaide as venues so that many of our South and Western Australian clients can attend. There will also be continual system updates and developments in order to enhance the functionality and efficiency of the aXcelerate system, so make sure you continue to stay tuned to these release notes as they are published in the new year.
We hope these new projects will help to make 2017 as successful a year as 2016! However the success of this year wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our clients, so we would like to thank you all for your ongoing commitment to aXcelerate. As a team, we would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. We look forward to speaking with you in the new year and to hit the ground running with our exciting new projects.
With Heart,
The aXcelerate team