Meet the Platform Innovator finalists in the 2022 CRN Impact Awards

A platform designed to speed up the processing of property development applications, an ERP system built and sold by a PC retailer, and digital overhaul for a multi-school sustainability program are finalists in the Platform Innovator category of the 2022 CRN Impact Awards.

The three CRN Impact Awards Platform Innovator finalists are:

Atturra’s ePlanning Integration Solution for local government councils
BPC Technology’s multi-channel enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for e-commerce companies
Exco Partners’ user experience-led digital solution for the Sustainability Victoria ResourceSmart Schools program

Atturra’s ePlanning Integration Solution

In July 2021, the New South Wales Government’s Department of Planning and Environment (DPE) launched the NSW Planning Portal to allow citizens to submit development applications for their properties digitally, replacing the previous arrangement that required hard copies of multiple reports and forms.

At the time, the portal was not integrated seamlessly with councils’ ERP software, and there was an opportunity to speed up applications. Sydney’s Atturra developed a solution to integrate the portal with ERPs from the likes of TechnologyOne and Civica, to help reduce backlogs, fix manual errors and ensure compliance.

The ePlanning Integration Solution is delivered as a managed service for on-premises and cloud environments and can be scaled to suit councils' needs.

It was built on Boomi’s Integration Platform as a Service (IPaaS) technology, enabling JSON to XML conversion and vice versa. Atturra also worked alongside TechnologyOne to build Planning Portal connectors to the vendor’s Property & Rating (P&R) platform.

Users include Albury City Council and Port Macquarie Hastings Council.

Early this year, Atturra reported revenue of $61.9 million for the first half of the 2021-22 financial year, an increase of 44 percent over the same period the previous year. IT services company FTS Group renamed to Atturra last year.

PC Technology’s multi-channel enterprise resource planning (ERP) system

As a retailer of PC hardware, components, peripherals, software and accessories, Victoria's BPC Technology saw its business grow substantially on the back of a booming gaming industry and increasing use of corporate technology products in recent years. But this demand resulted in its staff struggling to track orders, update listings and deal with enquiries from different sales channels, problems exacerbated by the scale of BPC Technology's inventory and constant product updates.

The company looked into existing complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions from established software vendors, but ultimately decided to develop its own multi-channel ecommerce ERP, enabling it to list products and process orders and enquiries from a single platform.

The result was MERP Enterprise, short for My ERP - a platform developed over a number of years, with a major update in 2021 activating such sales channels as the BPCT website, eBay, Amazon, Google shopping, Facebook shopping and WeChat.

BPC's pitch claims that MERP offers the same capabilities of an ERP but is designed to accommodate the breath and reach of a modern-day business operation by connecting every operational corner of the business and helping to foster a data-driven mindset across the business’ staff.

The platform features customisable widgets for key departments and inventory management and order processing capability, such as showing important operation messages and notifications and outstanding corporate improvement tasks requiring collaboration.

The company said the platform has increased order processing productivity by 82 percent, reduced an average of 32 minutes of order processing time, increased revenue by 35 percent with the same headcount, among others.

Sales of the platform have also added to BPC Technology's revenue. Other e-commerce companies, including Melbourne-based Japanese goods retailer JP Mart and a welding supply company, are among the users of the platform.

Exco Partners’ solution for the Sustainability Victoria ResourceSmart Schools program

Sustainability Victoria runs a sustainability and climate change education program ResourceSmart Schools (RSS) which provides guidance, knowledge and skills to help achieve measurable environmental change within schools and beyond.

The program was seeing declining user participation blamed on its legacy web application, which was unintuitive and built on an ageing ,slow technology stack - resulting in a range of user-related problems. Melbourne-based Exco Partners was engaged to replace the application with a more modern solution and address the decline in users.

Exco Partners used Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 CRM and Power platforms for the back-of-house functions and paired them with advanced user-interface capabilities from React. It also developed a framework called Digital Experience Runtime to facilitate development of React-based interfaces while also providing a toolset for interacting with the Dynamics 365 platform data.

Docker-based containerisation was also used for the interface and it enabled deployment in a serverless technology stack to simplify fully-automated deployments and ongoing support.

Exco sees the solution help further increase RSS’s reach and engagement of schools across Victoria to continue to deliver real world savings and awareness of effective and sustainable resource management.

Announcing the rest of the CRN Impact Award finalists and winners

Look out this week and next for CRN announcements detailing the rest of the finalists in the 2022 CRN Impact Awards.

The CRN Impact Awards winners will be revealed and celebrated on stage at the gala awards ceremony and dinner on 25 August at the Sheraton Grand Mirage Resort on the Gold Coast, as part of the CRN Pipeline 2022 conference.

The awards ceremony and dinner will be an opportunity for finalists to share their success with CRN journalists and the wider channel community and to network with Australia’s IT channel award winners. It will also be an opportunity for non-finalists to learn which channel partners kicked meaningful goals for customers in the last year, and meet them in-person.

Channel partners that attend the CRN Pipeline conference from 23-26 August at the same location can also network with Australia’s IT channel leaders and immerse themselves in top-class talks and roundtables about key business challenges and opportunities including staff shortages and hiring, economic outlook and key growth prospects.

Attend this year's premier channel awards, networking and strategic talk-fest - see the CRN Impact Awards and CRN Pipeline 2022 agenda.