Our February DealTrack update is now available within your UAT (user acceptance testing) environment. This provides the perfect opportunity to test newly introduced features, solution improvements and performance enhancements.
Twenty-fifteen saw the highest level of merger and acquisition activity in the UK since 2007 according to research by Experian. In fact, over 6500 mergers and acquisitions were completed in the UK in 2015 with a total value of £433bn. This was the highest value of deals since 2000. Brexit, the US election and US legislation changes have been blamed for a slight downturn in M&A since then, but nonetheless according to Dealogic the average merger or acquisition in 2016 was $104.2 million, and...Continue reading
For many businesses, the question is not if a disaster or power outage could happen, but when it will occur? And how severe it will be? As a company whose primary products are internet-based applications, it is of vital importance to Enable that our ability to host our clients’ applications remains unaffected in every eventuality that could be reasonably foreseen. Disaster recovery (DR) is not something that any business can afford to get wrong. This is why Enable takes it very seriously and, after recent events, can boast of having first-hand experience.
Sometime around 03:00 on Monday, December 4th, a water heater in the roof space in our unit 11 building failed and began to leak. The water heater was located above the stairwell and leaked through the first floor, destroyed ceiling tiles, flooded one of the staff toilets, and made its way through to the ground floor. Unfortunately, significant water had entered our server room. The water had run through all three server cabinets and the servers within. All local servers, networks, and internet access shut down after power was lost. This meant no access to telephone, email or any local IT infrastructure including domains, web servers, file servers, source control and deployment services.
One of the main advantages of hosting in the cloud rather than locally, is that no live systems or data were affected, this meant minimal impact on our clients. Also, due to sensible management of time and resources, projects that we had underway were still delivered to clients on time.
Ewan Gibb is the IT Manager at Enable and has been with the company for over 15 years, helping it evolve into the well-organized and responsive IT department that it is today. Ewan was heavily involved with the DR process for this incident from the moment it was reported, ensuring that our systems were back online and operating normally as soon as possible. Here are Ewan’s recollections of how the day’s events unfolded.
In order to prepare for major negotiations with suppliers, businesses often have to extract historical data from multiple systems: buying groups need information from their members' systems, newly merged businesses need information from different parts of the group. We have seen cases where managing large volumes of transactions with (largely) manual processes, such as spreadsheets, can have a detrimental impact on profitability, cash flow, supplier relationships and ultimately the performance o...Continue reading
UK Industry Leader Continues Rapid Expansion of North American Customer Base PRESS RELEASE: New York, NY and Stratford-upon-Avon, UK — February 6th, 2018 Enable, a global provider of collaborative rebate management software, today announced it has been selected by Wolseley Canada. Wolseley Canada joins other notable building materials distributors and buying groups on Enable’s rapidly growing North American client roster. As a leading wholesale distributor to plumbing, HVAC, waterworks and indu...Continue reading
Enable has more than 15 years of experience in designing, securing, and maintaining hosting environments on which our bespoke software solutions depend. Increasingly, we are deploying solutions to Azure, Microsoft’s globally-available cloud hosting platform. This leaves our clients safe in the knowledge their software is not only maintained and developed by Enable’s highly skilled team of developers but is also hosted on a secure and powerful platform in the form of Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure is a popular cloud hosting service that offers a secure, modern hosting platform with powerful features, such as the automatic provisioning of additional processing power during periods of high demand and continuous security-health monitoring, available out of the box. With industry leading hosting supporting our applications, developers at Enable are free to focus on delivering reliable and highly engaging software solutions.
You may be reading this blog for one of a number of reasons, e.g.: Your ERP system doesn’t have a vendor rebate module Your ERP system has a vendor rebate module but before implementing you want to draw up a requirements specification to check on the match to your business needs Your current vendor rebate module needs some work to meet your business needs You have more than one ERP system operating within your company, but need one module that sits across them all to manage vendor rebates acros...Continue reading
Users often decide in just a few seconds whether or not your site or app is worth their time. If your software is unusable or confusing, it can result in user mistakes, reduced productivity or even the total failure of the project. This is why user experience (UX), whilst often neglected, is one of the most important features of your software. What is user experience design?
UX design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the compatibility, usability, appearance and performance provided in the interaction between the end user and the software. In simpler terms, this means that good UX design works to ensure the user’s experience of your software is as enjoyable, intuitive and satisfying as possible. What is Enable’s approach to user experience design?
Enable is passionate about UX design. Our goal is that our applications genuinely enhance people’s day to day tasks and are a pleasure to use. To meet the high standards we set ourselves, we conduct a UX planning exercise for each area of work. The key point of this exercise is that, before any code is written, the team has considered the different possibilities for the look of what is to be created and how the user will interact with it. Planning is one part of the UX process but reviews are required to help consolidate it. During the build phase, UX reviews are held periodically to consider what has been developed and if it is the best that it can be for the client.
So let’s dive in and explore how user experience design can benefit your business.