New Service Enhancements in the Works: Standards, Distributors, and Stats Users

Over the past several months, we’ve sent a few posts about some big new projects we’re working on. Here’s a quick summary of where these projects stand, in order of readiness:

Online Collaboration Forums for Standards Development Committees

Online document sharing and balloting for standards development committees is nearly ready for use. We’ve taken a little extra time over the past two months working with developers to clean out the bugs, and improve the user experience.

Denise Rockhill has developed basic instruction guides for users, and has begun providing overviews and training via webinar to standards committee volunteers, and will continue through May, with a goal to start actual use in June.

We’re confident these online collaboration areas will be fairly intuitive for users, and will quickly serve to enhance communications and speed the standards development process.

Distributor State of the Fluid Power Industry Survey 

We’re very close to launch of this new survey, with the expected June release right around the corner. Distributor members should watch for notices in their emails. If you don’t see it in June, contact Eric Armstrong, (414) 778-3372.

This survey will parallel the manufacturer version, and like the manufacturer version is an opinion-based survey providing a sense for expected trends—in this case, through the distribution channel. The manufacturer State of Fluid Power correlates strongly with actual industry trend data, and we’re hoping the new distributor State of Fluid Power provides a similarly reliable look ahead at the distribution channel.

New Electronic Statistical Toolkit in Development

We just wrapped up a scoping and planning process with Northwoods Software for development of a whole new Electronic Statistical Toolkit. The new Toolkit will be accessible by browser through the cloud, making it easier to use and administer than the existing Excel-based Toolkit with its batch of downloadable files.

Having seen some early wire-frame prototypes, we think you will also like the cleaner and clearer user experience, and ability to save your favorite reports.

Programming for the new Toolkit begins with our new fiscal year in July, and we expect to see it in working form by the end of the calendar year. While we’ve provided fairly detailed specifications to the programs, we expect some of the usual back-and-forth adjustments and bug fixes will take place from there. We’ll also need to spend some time learning the new Toolkit back here before rolling it out to users. Expect to see it around this time next year…but if all goes smoothly, you’ll see it a little earlier.