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 2014 and preparing our 2015, on reflection aXcelerate have managed to make some significant changes and advances during this time.
The physical changes this year alone, have been considerable. Both myself and our founding Director, Jules, moved to Melbourne at the beginning of this year to launch the Victorian base of aXcelerate, while our business development manager, Chris, moved to Sydney in August to open our Sydney office. These moves have opened the door to some significant opportunities in both states while also providing us with the chance to visit many of our Victorian and New South Wales clients, which we have thoroughly enjoyed. 2015 also saw our Brisbane head office change locations from Indooroopilly to a larger building complex in Milton in order to accommodate for our growing team.
Many clients will have also witnessed a transformation to the visual aspects of the aXcelerate system, with our marketing material, the aXcelerate user interface and our website receiving a recent makeover. All of these client touch points have been re-designed to ensure we are presenting information that is clear, intuitive and easy for clients to navigate through.
In addition to our revived client touch points, our developers have been very busy this year implementing new features into aXcelerate. One of these has been our new reporting framework which has been designed to provide clients with a more comprehensive range of reporting options and the ability to personalise the reporting functions to better meet client’s specific requirements. On top of this, aXcelerate have also released our workflow automation functionality in order to provide our clients with added efficiency. This feature acts as a scheduling tool for organisations to automate many time-consuming business processes they currently do manually.
2015 also marked the completion of phase one of our integration with WordPress, which allows all of our clients who use the popular WordPress CMS, to have that information ‘talk’ and feed through to aXcelerate. We look forward to building more advanced functionality into our WordPress plugins in 2016.
Apart from new features, 2015 has also been a year where we’ve updated some of our business processes in order to ensure we are upholding our commitment to the H.E.A.R.T approach. To keep our clients better informed of the goings on of aXcelerate, we have initiated a monthly client newsletter to keep clients in the loop on any news or new features coming up, as well as providing short videos to demonstrate these new features.
We’ve also created an ‘ideas forum’ within our Support Centre (under Help in aXcelerate), to allow our clients a chance to provide their feedback and input into what they would like to see added to aXcelerate. We are now more consistently monitoring this important client forum and have made the commitment to continuously choose new features to add to aXcelerate directly from you, our clients.
As the year draws to a close, we are already constructing our goals for 2016 and have some exciting projects planned. 2016 will see a returned focus to training and 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 a little while. This will include the return of our fortnightly webinars and our aXcelerate Training academy.
We are currently working on our ‘CRICOS Automated’ extensions which will not only benefit existing and new CRICOS RTOs but also our existing RTO clients. We look forward to rolling out these great new features during 1st quarter of 2016…make sure you watch the release notes as they are published!
We hope these new projects will help to make 2016 as successful a year as 2015! However this success wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our clients, so I would like to thank you all for your ongoing commitment to aXcelerate. On behalf of aXcelerate I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy new year. I look forward to speaking with you in the new year and to hit the ground running with our exciting new projects.