Now that we’re firmly in the back half of 2019, I thought I’d provide an update on what we’ve been working on and what we’re excited to start rolling out in the coming months. Before I do that though, I wanted to extend a very sincere thank you to our customers. Already this year we’ve grown our DevonWay family about 20%, with no plans to slow down, and that simply wouldn’t be possible without the trust and faith that you put in us.
Now on to the good stuff. What has our product focus been, and where are we headed?
First and foremost, we’ve been aggressively expanding our solutions footprint into the Enterprise Asset Management space. (You may have noticed two new product suites on our website, Asset Management and Workforce Solutions.)
Why EAM? For one, it’s in our DNA. Our founder and Chairman of the Board, Bob Felton, introduced Enterprise Asset Management to the world through Indus International in the mid-90s. To continue that legacy was one of our founding principles.
Second and most importantly, what we excel at is digitizing and automating operational processes. Driving that core product capability closer to the point at which work is performed produces tremendous value, because that’s the best place to catch mistakes before they happen and capture the data so necessary to driving continuous improvement.
To deliver on that vision, in January we were delighted to add Lee Rogers to our team as Director of Enterprise Asset Management. Lee brings many years of industry experience, including seminal research work on mobile work execution while he was at the Electric Power Research Institute.
On the mobile side, we’ve continued to invest heavily in our capabilities, adding new features and broadening our deployments. In addition, our market research has shown that the ability to mark up a PDF within a fully digital environment accelerates the move away from paper by producing positive ROI without having to go through a capital-intensive initial conversion process – so this summer we’re excited to announce a native integration with PSPDFKit, a best-of-breed PDF annotation tool that offers tons of great out-of-the-box features.
On the non-mobile side, our focus has been on improving the overall user experience by upgrading our browser interface. This upgrade will incorporate modern metaphors that lower the learning curve, provide a consistent experience with other modern applications, and deliver functionality more intelligently to both frequent and infrequent users.
We plan to start beta testing the new user interface later this summer, and rolling it out to opted-in customers towards the end of the year. Look for more blog posts to come on this topic, where we will discuss some of the changes we’re considering, share screenshots, and more.
Finally, to ensure a continuous feedback loop with end users, a couple of months ago we integrated the Qualtrics user satisfaction survey tool directly within our browser desktop environment. Our goal is to deliver the most user friendly experience possible, so that direct interface with end users will let us know quickly where we’re falling short.
On a personal note, I’ve been at DevonWay for over thirteen years, and one of the reasons I love this company so much is that it’s never been boring. Even so, I can honestly state that this is one of the most exciting phases of our development yet. Look for great things to come this year and next!
And to our customers, I want to repeat – thank you for your trust and support, and we look forward to delighting you for many years to come.
