AMCS Platform 8.3

Reporting & Analytics work center

With the 8.3 release, we are launching a new self-service Reporting and Analytics work centre, your launchpad for all reporting and analytics. The highlight of this new work centre is the self-service embedded reporting tool.  It also includes an easily searchable repository of the standard reports catalogue,

With the new self-service embedded reporting tool, you will have unlimited layout and visualisation options to enable the creation of reports ranging from simple tabular listings to heavily formatted crosstabs or graphs. Features include:

• Create, customise, modify and save reports to manage your business insights
• Build, format and export reports for intuitive drag and drop reporting
• Robust filtering options such as filter hierarchies, prompting filters
• Build more sophisticated data manipulations (pivot and formulas) with Excel export
• Add multiple charts to various sections or reports for enhanced visualisation
• Access reports from anywhere in the system using the global search option

AMCS DataMart

For customers with their own visualisation tools or Business Intelligence technology, we are launching AMCS DataMart. The AMCS DataMart enables companies to leverage existing BI expertise and tools to build advanced analytics, dashboards and KPIs.

Customer Service work center

The 8.3 release sees the further transformation of the customer service work center to include pricing and contract management. Users can access the same comprehensive list of features that are now streamlined and redesigned through a Web UI to make navigation quick, easy, and intuitive.

Customer Service Agreements

The Customer Service agreement is at the heart of the Enterprise Management application. It is the place where details of the service and agreed prices with the customer are captured. The feature provides the ability to construct complex customer service agreements using new service agreement templates that can be defined by pricing managers or administrators.

• Define the information to be captured per line of business
• Automatic population of standard information
• Enables users to copy from a standard list of prices configured via price books
• Supports all standard functionality that was available in prior versions but in a more streamlined & intuitive manner

Price Wizard & Price Books

The new price wizard combines intuitiveness and automation with its sleek design. The feature focuses on enabling customers to set up complex pricing matrices with multiple options to tailor-make your pricing wizard.

• Users can choose price attributes that are clearly grouped under four major categories.
• Users can easily group and ungroup information presented to them throughout the wizard when configuring new price records.
• The system automatically creates the required configurations in certain cases driving more automation, less human intervention in configuring prices.

Price books also feature:

• Options to add individual price lines without going through the wizard
• Bulk update price records
• Options to link to price indexes
• Setup various price break models

Other new features delivered in the customer service work center includes:

• Time Zone Management
  For centralized operations where customers are serviced from multiple time zones, it can be a challenge to quickly & easily understand the times that events are happening both in the customer time zone and in your own time zone. This feature enables centralized service desk agents to handle these challenges in a swift way. The user can see certain information in the system in multiple time zones and have an option to switch between presenting the information specifically for a selected time zone.

• Site Health & Safety Inspections
  In certain regions, legislation enforces a mandatory requirement to inspect the site/service location for health and safety considerations before servicing it. This feature enables users to record site-level audit information such as the type of audit conducted and associate completed forms/documents related to the health and safety audit. The system also facilitates these safety documents to be transmitted to mobile devices so that drivers can access critical health and safety information while servicing the customer.

• Customer Overrides
  We understand that customers may have specific requirements on how materials, services, etc. are named when they appear on tickets, invoices & other documentation. To support the ability, the customer override functionality has been available as part of the AMCS Platform and this feature brings that functionality to WEB UI. With the new menus, customers can configure override values for actions, services, and materials, as well as configuring how materials brought in by an end-customer should be split at the scale automatically.

• Customer Level Manifest Setup
  For complex waste collections, particularly hazardous materials, there is an added benefit in storing the approved waste profiles for reuse in pending and future transactions. It allows for the quick creation of jobs with manifests/consignment/waste declarations that reference a waste stream. The profile for the waste stream is stored with the customer and represents a pre-approved, potentially previously sampled material.

• Convenience Charges
  This release now provides operators with the ability to charge customers a fee when a payment made is less than the minimum payment threshold.

Materials Management work center

The 8.3 release delivers a range of new features that have the potential to delight, transform and optimise your daily operations by providing an easy to use user interface and an integrated suite of core capabilities that better support key business functions in your organisation like inventory, purchasing, sales, production and various other yard activities. Enabling end to end digitised flows will ensure that your operations run smoothly while empowering your personnel to deliver the best performance.

Inventory Management

The Inventory Management module provides your inventory management team with the necessary tools to ensure that material inventory levels by outlet are more easily monitored and adjusted. As a result of being able to improve visibility on inventory position by material, your business will run with greater efficiency and address some of the common challenge faced by recycling operators like stockpiling and/or tying invaluable cash into inventory, Below are some of the key benefits you could start taking advantage of:

• Real-time view of inventory position by outlet, material, finish state
• New design for easy, single-view stock adjustments
• Supports both company-owned and customer-owned inventory
• Reduce or eliminate the need for regular cycle counts

Production Shifts

Fully integrated into our Inventory capability, the new production shift features included in this release will provide your Production team with the necessary tools to more effectively manage and schedule material transformation production runs across all your production lines. With our integrated dashboard, Production Managers can ensure production lines are used efficiently and at full capacity. Below is a summary of the new functionality being delivered.

• Schedule production shifts across all production lines with an easy to use calendar.
• Create recipes to be used as a template when creating production shifts
• Easily define input and output materials in and out of each of your production lines, saving time
• Record downtime and productive hours to better monitor actual production costs per material

Material Sales

The newly redesigned material sales modules provide sales executives with the necessary tools to create, manage and fulfil customer sales orders. Sales orders are linked with material sales slots created by the inventory manager as materials become available, as production shifts are completed.

Users now have the capability to more easily communicate on material availability, monitor order fulfilment levels and are better able to more effectively manage and optimise the sales order cycle. Some of the key benefits your team could draw from these new capabilities are summarised below.  

• Improve staff visibility as of when the material will become available for sale,
• Improve visibility of sales orders fulfilment levels and expected sales revenue
• Digitise and automate your order fulfilment process

Demand Planning enhancements

This latest release delivers enhancements that provide your purchasing team with the necessary tools to ensure a continuous and optimal supply of material to meet your production needs in a timely and cost-controlled manner.

• Enriched user interface with new key data, enhanced graphs, and job colour coding
• View average weight of material from suppliers
• The release number is now added to calendar events
• Quick access to demand plan and PO statuses

Grading & Quality Evaluation enhancements

Further enhancements to the Grading & Quality Evaluation module provide recycling operations with the necessary tools to ensure that an effective and standardised material receiving process is in place.  This module is concerned with ensuring that the material you are receiving is of the quality grade you paid for so that your inventory levels correctly reflect the materials you have received excluding any weight related to contaminants, moisture, and any other prohibitives that may have been included.

• Yard inspectors can more easily select materials using a type-ahead search
• Yard managers can better enforce material receipting policies by making the capture of key data mandatory when reporting on the quality of the materials received

Also new to 8.3 is a new barcode receipting option which provides graders with two new modes of operation:

• ‘Scan & Grade’ – In this mode, the yard inspector are invited to scan a unit of material and to record the weight and material grade.
• ‘Scan a Load’ – In this mode, the yard inspector, after selecting the vehicle registration, is presented with a list of the material unit expected on the load. The user can scan each unit of material one after the other to ensure that all units that are expected on the load have been received.

With this release, we have also enhanced the outbound grading process for materials leaving the facility. This includes the addition of pictures, documentation and capturing other data specific to a load.

Receiving Hazardous Material Loads

Another new feature to the 8.3 release allows waste management companies to more easily manage the receipting of hazardous materials across a number of outlets, specifically where materials are different from the manifest and attached waste profile.

• Users can now make changes to a manifest or create an entirely new manifest if the material actually received is different from the original profile.
• Make price changes due to changes in material and/or a different treatment process required.
• For unplanned hazardous material loads, users can create jobs or manifests from scratch at the receiving dock.

AMCS Connectivity

AMCS Connectivity offers businesses a secure and reliable range of integration services including APIs and Connectors to process and data between AMCS platform and third-party applications. Our Connectivity portfolio connects and processes data, devices, and people to support innovation and agility within your technology stack.

• New REST API
  This 8.3 release sees the introduction of the new REST API. New REST endpoints give integrators access to the primary AMCS Platform ERP business objects including those for Customers, Suppliers, General Ledger Journals, Invoices, and Credits. The AMCS Platform REST API interface has been developed in line with RESTful principles to ensure a high level of Hypermedia Maturity Model compliance. The REST interface provides functionality for real-time, two-way data exchange facilitating system synchronization, integration, reporting, and data warehouse activities.

• GL Journal Connector Enhancements
  The 8.3 release now includes additional screens to enable configuration and maintenance of General Ledger (GL) defaults. The new GL screens provide the ability to define the chart of account structure, determine the hierarchy to be used for the account generator, and specify standard defaults for control and other static accounts.

Several incremental changes have been made to the GL Export functionality:

• Control accounts can now be specified for rebates and rebate accruals giving the ability to choose to treat these as AR or AP transactions
• Container type can be used to set the account analysis codes for journal entries
• Credit Notes post to the same control account as the invoice they are linked to
• Reference fields are now populated for the revenue line

Mobile Workforce

With the 8.3 release, we’re building on health and safety with the new site audit feature and faster training of new drivers on a route with our new Guided Navigation feature.

• New Guided Navigation feature
  This latest release delivers a new feature from AMCS Guided Navigation, available through AMCS Mobile. With the new feature, dispatch personnel can use existing routes as master guides to create and edit the route so as to ensure that the new driver will service all the customers. This eliminates the need to pair the new driver with a more experienced driver familiar with the route. 
  
  
• Driver awareness of customer site hazards
  To improve the safety of drivers and that of the end customers, this feature provides drivers with details of potential hazards at customer sites on the route. This information is available offline and clearly flagged on the driver's mobile device.

Digital Engagement

AMCS’ self-service portals transform how you engage with customers and partners by digitizing customer and subcontractor processes. This latest release delivers added features for greater real-time visibility and insights into services.

AMCS Customer Portal

• New operator insights on customer activity
  We have now introduced the additional capability to gain valuable insights into the customer activity across key functional areas including payments, document download, user registrations, and frequently accessed features. New reports in graphical and tabular views, can be download for further analysis.

Insights include the number and amount of payments in a date range, number of invoices, reports, and tickets downloaded in a date range, knowing the number of registered users and logins per month.

• New site creation for end-users
  This feature enables customers to create a new delivery site while placing a new order, removing the need for end-customers to call your help desk and brings even more self-service capabilities to our customer portal.

• Open-to-Buy (OTB)
  This feature is aimed at municipal/residential customer sign-ups. It enables Operators to take orders from these customers by simply authorizing their credit cards without the need to take payment upfront, to simplify the onboarding process.

• NEW Customer Portal APIs
  These new APIs equip waste and recycling operators to build a branded customer self-service mobile application or integrate our portal application with your pre-existing web applications. This includes:
  - Customer's service information including customer details, active services, outstanding balance, aged debt information, collection history, tickets, activity summary
  - End-users are able to raise queries/communications, and place call outs/deliveries against their active services

AMCS Subcontractor Portal

• New real-time visibility of job acceptance status
  As subcontractors confirm acceptance of subcontracted jobs, operators will now have real-time visibility of the acceptance of the Jobs in the relevant AMCS Enterprise Management screens.

• New real-time visibility of route confirmation
  As subcontractors confirm subcontracted routes via the Subcontractor Portal, operators will have real-time visibility of the status updates in the relevant Enterprise Management screens further streamlining the workflow of managing subcontracted work