It’s been a busy year for FlowCentric, with great changes, enhancements and advancements. We end the year off on a high note, with the launch of Processware 2013 and a new partnership with Guideline BizTech finalised.
There’s a lot to look forward to in 2014 and we anticipate good growth for BPM which is increasingly considered by companies as a strategic business tool for optimising workflow, entrenching process and ensuring compliance for better governance.
We will kick-start 2014 with our annual Partner Awards Function early in the year. We believe it will be a great opportunity to touch base with our partners and set the tone for what promises to be an exciting year.
On behalf of everyone at FlowCentric Technologies, we wish you a blessed festive season and a prosperous and healthy new year. If you are travelling over the holidays, keep safe.
Dennis Bensch was appointed as the Product Development Director at FlowCentric. He joined our team in October after a 14 year tenure at Inobits where most recently he was the Head of Solutions Delivery. He has tremendous expertise having worked with blue chip companies to deliver complex enterprise systems. FlowCentric has had the privilege of working with Dennis on numerous projects over the years and we look forward to working more closely with him.
As part of his role, he will also spearhead the FlowCentric Cloud Strategy. Dennis will leverage our existing, highly-capable team as a platform to drive new generation solutions-development to ensure that FlowCentric remains at the cusp of new trends and changes in the continuously evolving solutions landscape.
September saw the launch of FlowCentric Processware 2013. Developed for desired flexibility, it integrates with the array of typical business and operational systems utilized in the organisation. The system is easily customized to align with customer specific process requirements and KPIs – effectively closing the gap between people, processes and technology infrastructures.
The new version has been designed to dramatically bolster the end-user experience, with process orchestration and information relating to user-specific tasks aggregated into a single view. It also boasts optimised search capability, empowering users to find processes and related documents easily, dramatically improving productivity. Integrated with Microsoft Outlook, users work seamlessly within an environment with which they are familiar.
FlowCentric Processware is 64-bit ready, enabling faster processing speeds and enhanced redundancy. To support companies’ mobile ambitions, and the prolific and speedy adoption of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), Processware 2013 is fully-enabled for mobile, bringing most of the functionality, information, and control available on desktops to mobile devices.
We’ve overhauled the FlowCentric website to reflect the dynamic, friendly and vibrant company that we are. The new website is built on more modern technology, and is designed to provide users a better experience. The website is more interactive and visitors now have opportunities to engage with FlowCentric from the site and offer feedback. People can comment on the news articles for instance and there are videos and demonstrations of our product to watch. Check out our new site and be sure to ‘meet’ the directors, under the profiles section, and find out who runs the show here at FlowCentric.
We’ve upgraded and enhanced our Partner Portal to ‘embrace’ the value-adding philosophy that underpins everything we do at FlowCentric. The portal is easy to navigate and jam-packed with information and tools to make it easier for our partners to transact with us, and deliver value to their customers. The portal boasts rich content, segmented into vertical and horizontal solutions; which partners can leverage for brokering deals and marketing.
Africa remains a strategic growth area for FlowCentric and we are pleased to report that our African business has enjoyed an impressive 70% growth this year. There has been a marked upswing in the number of Business Process Management deployments in East African countries such as Kenya, Ghana, Botswana, Nigeria, Zambia, and the Congo.
Much of this interest and growth is attributed to the maturing of business process and compliance requirements. People are starting to see how BPM can work with other enterprise systems to optimise their business environments. There’s no need to re-write or replace systems. Instead they can optimise what they’ve got relatively cheaply and easily with BPM. We have a local presence in most of the countries we work in, and we have just launched FlowCentric in Zimbabwe with a local partner, West Chase Solutions.
We’ve noticed growing demand for our Extended Business Solutions (EBS), which although packed to meet specific requirements of different areas of business, are easily customised to suit individual business requirements. Standalone or as part of a broader BPM initiative, Extended Business Solutions fill shortfalls in other business systems to deliver on specific process requirements.
Think of them as readymade process applications which can be deployed quickly, easily and cost-effectively without depending on other systems such as ERP to work. We have Extended Business Solutions for Human Resources, to manage processes such as onboarding and recruitment; solutions for Finance, to manage expense claims processes, and ready-solutions for managing SHEQ procedures, amongst others. We expect the demand for process-specific applications like our Extended Business Solutions to continue to grow as companies seek to optimise their business systems without replacing or derailing them.