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 Ibcos business to meet the needs of our dealership 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.
The Gold system is incredibly feature rich and has been designed around the needs of the agricultural and groundscare industries. It is also highly integrated to key OEM and supplier systems, automating dealership processes and improving your operational efficiency. We are excited to share with you the new features that are planned based on your feedback as well as the extensive programme of OEM integration requests on our 2024 roadmap.
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 Gold we have been transforming the underlying infrastructure of the product. In Q1 of 2024 you will see our first release of program transformation when we deliver modernised versions of Workshop Scheduler and Job Creation functions.
This programme of work will then continue stage by stage to deliver modernised sections of the system as part of our standard release process, avoiding disruption to your business. This means that we must deliver software that is intuitive, so we have invested in additional product and development resources that specialise in the design of software to improve the User Experience (UX). The objective is to minimise the need for training and documentation. We know user documentation and release notes can be boring, 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. We will be canvassing your opinion on our new approach very soon.
One challenge we need to address is that over 100 dealerships using Gold need to have their server technology upgraded to work with our modernised software. This is a common industry issue, as software advances, the hardware infrastructure must be changed to keep up. Our account management team will be in touch with those of you affected by this.
Throughout 2023 we have been working with the manufacturers to deliver new integrations intended to make your interactions with them more efficient. Here are some examples of what we have worked on:
- AGCO Plus: a finance offering for your customers to use when purchasing parts and service
- AGCO B2B2C: an extension of the Agco ecommerce function to end customers
- AGCO CPQ: a machine configuration portal
- John Deere PoPS ElIPS phase 2: Improvements to PoPS (Percentage of Products Serviced) ELIPS (Equipment Lifecycle Integration of Parts & Service) which is a Dealer-to-John Deere integration of machine repair data and parts sales
- John Deere ecommerce: to be released before year-end
- John Deere Workshop Efficiency Tracker: also to be released by year-end
We are also delighted to announce that we are in the final stages of obtaining CNH Warranty Attestation. Once signed off, CNH dealers will be able to process warranty jobs using Gold and the Gold Service App
In 2024 we have a number of projects lined up for development, these include:
- Manitou Job Request portal, linking their telematics to Gold
- CLAAS Digital Service Manager
- CLAAS PIM updates
- CNH Digital job cards
- CNH Data Exchange Platform
- CNH CRM
- CNH Standard Repair times
- John Deere ebilling changes for England, Wales and Scotland.
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.
