Achieving greater insight

In the 35 years since the company started there have been many changes to the industrial landscape. However, the need to effectively manage assets and maintenance has remained a constant and SSG Insight – or SoftSols Group, as the company was known until December 2017 – has continued to drive forward and evolve its software solutions to meet the needs of its customers. The enduring success of its Agility system was a key reason for the company's change of name, as David Hipkin, CEO, explains: "People latched onto the name Agility and knew what it stood for as a product, but they didn't know the business name behind it." 

As part of its quest to deliver further value and insight to customers, SSG has grown its workforce, bringing in people with new skills, and appointing a new senior management team. 

Hipkin says: "Raising the profile of the business was very important. We've always had a lot of good, very skilled technicians and now we've beefed up the commercial and product offering. This is good news for our customers as it means we'll be getting more specific in our approach - really connecting with the manufacturing guys to find out more about the data they need to understand, whether that's about the causes of breakdowns or insight into achieving operational production line efficiencies." 

Jon Moody, Chief Product Officer, adds: "We've taken a good, hard look at our products. We've got a fantastic, long-standing customer base. Agility gets great reviews and a lot of the business we get is referrals. Fundamentally the product is sound and it’s packed full of features. What we want to do now is to bring it more into the twenty-first century in terms of how we expose those features. 

“One of the things we're investing in is the user experience. Our products are used in a wide range of environments, not just an office, and this presents challenges. We're trying to really understand the issues faced by different customers in different sectors. 

“A key tenet of what we're looking to do is to make life simpler for people. A lot of work is going into making the interface easier and exposing the functionality that's already there”

Product launches

As part of that process, the company has just launched Agility 9, which features a new dynamic smart dashboard which delivers real-time performance insight by allowing users to assemble their own interactive dashboard built from a set of configurable widgets. Each widget is directly connected to key performance indicators within Agility, for example availability of resources, monitoring of maintenance costs, and tracking asset breakdowns. These are selected from a menu and dragged and dropped onto the dashboard, so that users can select those that are most relevant to their needs. 

Moody continues: "Agility 9 is going to make it easier for people to have the information they need at their fingertips on a day-to-day basis. The next step in that evolution is to give customers more information on which to base their strategic decisions.” 

As such, the company will be launching a cloud-based Business Intelligence product later this year and will be leveraging the data locked up in customers' Agility databases. Moody says: "It's not just about making tactical day-to-day decisions, it's about looking to the future, looking at trends, looking at what decisions need to be taken next month, in six months, or next year, and really trying to provide greater insight to customers, giving them information that they might not have seen before even though that data was available.” 

Other plans for this year include development of the company’s mobile platform. Moody says: “We've got a very well used, well-respected Android application and we've got a number of Windows mobile applications. What we're looking to do is consolidate all of these into a brand new application which is going to be a cross mobile platform. You can keep using Android, you can use iOS and you can still use Windows. That has the potential, we think, to become the next generation of the product.” 

David Hipkin feels very positive about the changes the company has made and the benefits these will deliver to customers: "Moving forward it’s no longer just about maintenance; it’s about incorporating all the different bits of a business and helping companies to make smart decisions, better manage their resources and, ultimately, improve their performance.”