Friday, July 31, 2020

We're moving!

UniPhi is having a big life moment that we would like to share with you.

After 17 years of living out in Hurstville, our HQ is finally moving to Sydney's CBD!

That's right, our commute is changing and we're pretty excited about it.

Of course we'll miss Hurstville. There have been a lot of memories in our office over the 17 years. We've even been there since before UniPhi was created and we were just mbh....

Hurstville saw the inception of UniPhi from idea to the creation of a spin-off company, numerous staff members starting out their careers and then setting off on new adventures and staff members growing their careers from mbh to UniPhi (some are even still here today). It's even  been the place our MD's children have gone from babies to teenagers/adults - we have the artistic evidence memorialised on one whiteboard.
Said whiteboard with 2 out of 3 of the UniPhi kids

It's safe to say that we have gotten to know Hurstville really well over the past (almost) two decades, but we're looking forward to finding brand new lunch spots. We've spent way too long at the Ritz pub and have tried the entire menu AND menu changeovers.

Now, as of Monday 3rd of August, we'll be located at Regus World Square located at Level 45/680 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000.

An exciting new chapter for our company and a dress code upgrade, no more shorts and flip flops for us. We look forward to showing you our new digs next week - I heard the view is amazing.

Until then, follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to see the update and enjoy the weekend. I'm going to spend mine using this as an excuse to upgrade my wardrobe.

For anyone who has never seen our office or current and previous employees, here are some final photos from Hurstville:




Packing Up
All Packed Up and Ready to Go

Thursday, July 30, 2020

UniPhi 16 - New Embedded Dashboards

Each module in UniPhi has its own dashboard views of the data contained therein. Unlike document templates, this can only be viewed by licensed users (unless you like snipping screens). However, as UniPhi's vision is to be the one app to rule them all, we hope that all users in the project environment are on our platform and hence the document templates become less relevant while our embedded dashboards become much more relevant.

For our property development clients, the cost dashboard is a key output of UniPhi. Being able to see the portfolio of projects in one screen and now that any variances to budget is based off live up to the minute information is unique in the marketplace.

Cost dashboard with forecast versus approved budget across the portfolio


UniPhi 16 has added a new dashboard for users that leverages our accounting integrations. The new dashboard is the AP dashboard and can be found in the resources module. Just like it's twin sister the AR dashboard, it will display all outstanding supplier invoices and their age. This will mean project managers no longer need to check with accounts to answer a supplier who is chasing payment, they can even check the balance from their phone while talking to the contract on-site.

AP Dashboard
Find out what else we have in our update tomorrow on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Tuesday, July 14, 2020

New SQL Reporting Services Reports in UniPhi 16


OK, so we're suppose to be publishing daily but we slipped a couple ok! So now getting back to business...

UniPhi 16 comes with three new reporting services reports. For those non-techy people, Reporting Services refers to the Microsoft platform used to create the reports by the UniPhi software development team. In this release, the following reports have been added or updated:

  • Programme Revenue by Code and Project
  • Programme Revenue by Code and Project Export
  • Portfolio Milestones

The most popular out of these 3 is the new portfolio milestone report. This report leverages off a bespoke report we built for one of our clients. It pivots the information into a matrix of milestones as column headings and projects as rows. This means you can scan down the screen and see when all "Go Live" milestones are going to occur or "Ribbon Cutting Ceremonies" (Good for ministers comms planning) etc. The storyboard dashboard out of Power BI is also a great visualisation of this portfolio data but that is for another blog post on another day.

One important UniPhi feature of this report is the use of project milestone templates to aggregate them into commonly named milestones, otherwise each column would be relevant for only 1 row. The parameter options at the top of the report allow you to select a milestone template to use that will then drive the column headings (even if a milestone's description has been changed by an end user, it will still aggregate under its associated template heading).



Portfolio milestone parameters including milestone template


The other good element of this report is that it contains links to the milestone data entry page for each project so you can quickly go and amend the data if one of the dates is wrong


As no doubt the sharp readers of our blog posts would have noticed, the other two reports are named exactly the same except that one has the word export at the end. We do this when we want one version of the report to be available for issuing to stakeholders with nice headers and the parameters of the report displayed at the top while the other is formatted as a data dump to excel for further manipulation. Of course the demand for this type of data dump is diminishing as the use of Power BI increases.

Remember to follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter to keep up to date!

Thursday, July 09, 2020

UniPhi 16 - Reports, reports, reports

Did you know there are FIVE different reporting platforms in UniPhi? Each has been designed with a different purpose in mind.

Each module has a dashboard entry point mainly comprising tabular information of the portfolio contextualised to the module itself. For example, document registers across the portfolio are displayed in the documents module while portfolio cost reporting can list all projects in the portfolio and their current variance to budget (a favourite of development directors everywhere).

For desktop publishing requirements, UniPhi's template engine enables PDF reports to be generated from the content stored across the application. These PDFs automatically apply the brand and style of your company to the document. This includes logos, coversheets, fonts, colours and layout.

For those who like numbers, UniPhi uses Microsoft's SQL Reporting Services platform to generate all sorts of registers and analytics including cash flow, profitability, risk and issue information. These reports can be sent to excel for further manipulation or for sending to stakeholders who do not have access in the system.

Next on the list is the Dashboards module that have standard visualisations built by the UniPhi software teams. Our favourite is the submissions dashboard that shows win/loss rates for your bids.



And finally, the pièce de résistance, our embedded Power BI dashboards provide a limitless scope of data visualisation and analytics.



UniPhi 16 has enhanced each and every platform. Over the coming days we will outline the changes to each one. In the meantime, check out today's video to see each platforms capability.



All our UniPhi 16 Fairy Bread updates are posted to LinkedIn and Twitter daily, so don't forget to follow us to keep updated!