Blog

G’Day,

Well, the COVID-19 financial year is over and we are all optimistic that we are past the most intense period. The year has put the spotlight on eCommerce and all clients have leveraged TOTECS and SQUIZZ.com to maintain or grow their business online. After a wild April/May 2020 when nationwide lockdowns bit hard and demand patterns swung all over the place, supply chains have mostly recovered. That said, hiccups continued to impact the market with stock shortages caused by lockdowns and impacts to manufacturing overseas.
 

A New Era For eCommerce

COVID-19 has heralded a new era of working and doing business from anywhere. Our business has transitioned to a 3 tier working model whereby the home office is the primary location (tier 1), our hub office for collaboration and training (tier 2) and mobile office in the field (tier 3) is the new normal. When we asked our team in June, the feedback was that the work anywhere model has had an overall positive impact on productivity by eliminating the commute and enabling people to focus. That said, bringing people together remains important and collaboration in both our SQUIZZ.com platform and through video conferencing tools has maintained connection and continuity.

In the market, the changing patterns of working have given eCommerce a dramatic boost and fortunately our clients have benefited as customers moved to working and buying online. Profoundly, those who were setup with full automation received the greatest wins both in demand and efficiencies. Where lockdown restrictions caused skeleton crews in the warehouse, the eCommerce website continued to push orders through and remote administration and customer service personnel could manage the activity remotely.  

 

Paving The Way Towards The Connected Economy

Another broader trend we have seen occurring before COVID-19 hit is the transition of the Millennials as they enter the workforce. This new generation expects online tools and data to be at their fingertips. They are quick to adopt and embrace new technologies with hunger for smarter and more efficient means of connectivity across the markets they work in. 

Universal data exchange and digital trust are emerging themes and we are leading the way on these fronts with the progression of SQUIZZ.com. Our platform is transforming the thinking and opening up new frontiers of cross market opportunities as we pave the way towards building the Connected Economy where we bridge secure trusted relationships between people, organisations, marketplaces and the assets they own.

Whilst eCommerce remains entrenched as a successful vendor lead initiative, interest in public and private marketplaces is growing and I am delighted to advise that Connected Marketplaces will be released during this financial year. Stay tuned.
 

E-Invoicing / PEPPOL and Full Procurement Automation

We have had requests from clients who have customers asking to post documents through the new Australian Government e-Invoicing initiative, which will become compulsory for all Government departments by June 2022. E-Invoicing through PEPPOL will be developed into SQUIZZ.com over the coming 6 months so if you have clients looking for this capability, get in touch with us.

Additionally, we have also received requests from clients who wish to provide their customers with guidance on how to automate their procurement workflows beyond submitting web orders or synchronising product pricing and stock via connected relationships on SQUIZZ.com. We are currently building a content page template that can be embedded into your TOTECS website that instructs customers on the various methods to automate using SQUIZZ.com. We will get in touch this month to explain how this works and see if your business can utilise this tool.

If you wish to learn more, contact rachael.a.marston@squizz.com

 

2022 Don’t Miss The First Connected Economy Conference

Get ready for March 2022, where we will be showcasing eCommerce, Connected Commerce, Integrated Supply Chain, Universal Data Interchange, Smart Assets and Smart Cities with key technology and industry partners at the first Connected Economy Conference.  This 2 day event will be one not to miss and more details will follow in the coming months.

 

New Rocket Boosters For TOTECS and SQUIZZ

The TOTECS and SQUIZZ technology stacks are just about to get turbo charged with the recent significant investment into 10 latest release HPE enterprise servers where each server has the equivalent power of approximately 59,000 iPhones. The new servers will be provisioned in our Servers Australia and Equinix Data Centres over the coming 3 months. 

There are two key goals, which are to increase redundancy and speed up the processing time for each request to boost your online users’ experience. Our goal is to achieve 99.9% up-time where the new infrastructure is split between data centres whilst giving at least 3X speed increase for every URL request served.

Currently, TOTECS processes over 7 million eCommerce Server Requests per month which has grown by 2 million requests per month in 2 years. The new servers are provisioned to handle up to 10 times this capacity which gives plenty of blue sky to grow your online presence and harness both platforms to further automate your sales and customer service processes.

 

Changes To Billing Rates

Every 5 years we review our billing rates and there will be some changes coming into effect 1^st August 2021. The cost for IT personnel across all disciplines has nearly doubled over the past 5 years with most of the impact occurring due to COVID-19 period where demand for IT resources has risen dramatically with a major skills shortage in Australia.  Our implementation rates need to catch up and there is an increase of $40 / hr across all skill levels commencing 1^st August 2021.

There are some other alterations and an email will be sent to your accounts team outlining the full set of changes.

The good news is the base rates for Server Requests have not altered as a price increase was implemented in December 2019.

 

New Faces Join Our Team

Matthew Purss

In March, we welcomed Matthew Purss on board into the role of Head of Product Operations. Matthew has an extensive career across IT and Computer Science focused in the areas of Geophysics, Geospacial coordinate systems and scalable database / cloud architecture. Matthew will lead the migration of the TOTECS and SQUIZZ cloud architecture to the new hardware platform as well as the designing of the new Kubernetes N-Scalable cloud stack that will follow behind. Matthew is a leading digital geospacial software engineer and his DGGS technology will be incorporated into SQUIZZ.com Smart Assets as part of the Smart Cities build out of 2022.

 

Alicia Hagen

With extensive experience across digital marketing, strategy, content creation and website design, Alicia has joined our team as Head Of Communications. Alicia’s deep knowledge of SEO, SEM, Social Marketing has generated exceptional results for the businesses she has worked with and we are delighted to apply her broad skillset to help both our clients and our platforms scale.

 

Cassie Spear

Cassie comes on board as Head Of Community with exceptional experience working with community across various industries. In recent times, she has managed hackathon events for RMIT University and has a keen ear to the ground in the tech space. Cassie’s primary focus is to develop and lead the partner program for both TOTECS and SQUIZZ along with managing relations with the software vendors and their communities that we integrate with.

 

Mustafa Mustafa

Having worked in the IT industry all over the world, Mustafa has provided technical support for some the biggest companies on the planet. With a strong technical ability and friendly approach to resolving issues quickly, Mustafa comes on board to provide advanced support for our clients. If it’s a gnarly issue, Mustafa will be onto it.

 

Raz Nayani

eCommerce website implementation is an integral part of developing and growing your TOTECS eCommerce presence. Whether its building a new TOTECS website or adding features or workflow alterations, Raz joins our implementation team to deliver quality results according to industry best practice and is very excited to be part of the team.

 

Gearing Up For Online Growth

Never has there been a time where the opportunities for developing new online sales channels have been better. With the entire world now online, the world is literally at your feet.  The key point in this new era is that Data Is King and online sales growth correlates to how quickly and easily your customers can source accurate product information.  Whether it’s searching your TOTECS eCommerce website or getting real time catalogue, pricing and stock feeds through a SQUIZZ.com Connected Trading Relationships, you are in a strong position to grow your business online and tap new opportunities at scale. 
 

I sincerely know that 2022 will be a success for us all and we look forward to continuing our work with you to grow your business success online.

 

- Glenn Drew