Monday, August 10, 2020

Take a tour of our new office

Last week was one heck of a week..

UniPhi 16 went live, we had three new recruits start and we moved into our new office.... and we're loving it.

From level 45 we have some pretty good views facing south. Even if I'm scared of heights, everyone else loves peering out the windows trying to spot our old office and homes.

I also don't know about everyone else, but I've personally enjoyed eating my way around the block. In one week one tea shop already recognises me (I don't know if that should be embarrassing or not)...

So without further ado, here are some photos for our new office on Level 45, 680 George Street, Sydney NSW 2000:

Communal lounge and kitchen area

All set up and ready to work


Window View

Trying to spot places in South Sydney

Working hard

Getting caught taking pictures of window washers (hence the blurry quality)

Keep up to date with all news UniPhi on LinkedIn and Twitter!

Thursday, August 06, 2020

UniPhi 16 - New API End Points for Power BI Dashboards

After a slow start, our integration with Power BI is starting to be utilised to its fullest by many of our clients. This has been very exciting for us as we get to see the sorts of reports and data analytics end users really want with the data they input into UniPhi. This is driving great ideas for our UniPhi 17 release where we plan to embed small visualisations throughout the application to assist users to gain insigths into their work, project or portfolio of projects just as they add more content to the system.

To assist this, we've had to rapidly build out our API. New end points included in our 16 release are:
  • ForecastToComplete
  • MilestoneHistory
  • PersonRate
  • TimesheetForecast
And some extra fields added:
  • ClassificationCode field to Person endpoint
  • Current cost and charge rates to the Person endpoint
If you don't know what we're talking about in terms of Power BI and UniPhi, check out the various videos here:

Check out the rest of our UniPhi 16 updates on LinkedIn and Twitter!

We've been on a hiring spree!

Instead of end of financial year shopping, we decided to go on a recruiting spree.

We're pleased to be welcoming 4 new recruits to the UniPhi and mbh training team!
From left to right we have Andrew, Freeda, Matthew and the spirit of our fourth recruit, Panos.

Freeda and Andrew are our new front-end developers. Andrew is yet to graduate university - just one keen bean, whilst Freeda has had over a decade of work experience working as a software developer and business analyst.

Matt, has founded his own company, pivoted from data scientist to software developer and is joining us as our new back-end developer. Panos will be joining remotely in a couple of weeks as he is stuck in Melbourne! Keep safe for us Panos!

This new group's first project is to create a new training admin system for our sister company mbh training. Our colleagues at mbh are excited to get the first major upgrade to their current processes in 17 years!

We're excited to have such a great mix of new employees and are looking forward to the new ideas and skills they'll bring to UniPhi and mbh.

In three weeks our latest intern program will kick off with a very exciting project focused on data analytics and machine learning....watch this space.

Check back in on our LinkedIn and Twitter page to keep up to date with all our new projects.

Tuesday, August 04, 2020

UniPhi 16 is live!

It's now August and as promised, UniPhi 16 is here!

This is what we are calling our fairy bread release because we have made 100s and 1000s of updates across the system to improve the user experience (UX) and user interface (UI). 

Us sprinkling on the improvements

We hope all our users enjoy these updates, as many of them were born, tested and improved from user feedback and suggestions.

We've been posting these updates throughout July and will continue to do so throughout August. There were too many great ones to stop now, so keep on checking LinkedIn and Twitter to keep up to date.

Updates we've already posted about that you can catch up on are:
Many of you will have already had UniPhi 16 deployed but if you haven't and would like to get yours up and running today, contact your account manager today!

Monday, August 03, 2020

UniPhi 16 - Document Template Reports

UniPhi has an in-built template engine that allows you to compile PDF style reports dynamically using the data that is stored in the various modules. The first step in creating one of these reports is to develop the base template. Within these templates are document objects that have predefined formats and queries that pull in the data. For example, you can use the "Budget" document object to automatically pull in the budget of the project into a document as a table (Note there's also chart document objects that would display the budget elements as a column graph).

Over the years we have focused more and more on increasing the flexibility of these objects when presented to the ultimate end user who is using the template to generate the document. This has included things like the ability to hide or display a column, edit column headings and hide rows.

The benefit of this reporting tool over the other 4 is the ability to add commentary and integrate a whole range of content. Hence it is used for two main types of reports - simple notices or letters to external stakeholders and detailed progress reports that explain how a project or portfolio of projects are tracking, The resulting document that is generated isn't really a document but a number of database records but it can be rendered to look like a document using the in-built PDF engine that will transform that data from database records to a PDF document of high professional standard. This includes applying your carefully developed style guide to the document, inserting the appropriate headers and footers, page numbers and controlling versions so the latest and greatest is the one that is sent out.

UniPhi 16 continues on this path with the following changes:

1) Added Expenditure columns to Project Costs document object. This object replicates the contracted view of the costs module but now also displays the expenditure columns that are included in the MS SQL Reporting Services project cost reports that can be run from the reports module (see the previous SQL blog).

2) Budget approval documents will now indicate if an original or approved budget snapshot will be created on sign-off. This helps approvers of budgets to understand better the implications of signing off a document
Budget for approval options in Documents

3) Budget template control now has a rounding option for the total column. This includes displaying the values in thousands, millions etc and is a reflection of the scale of some of the projects being managed in UniPhi.
Round Budget Options

4) Contract Deliverables and Contract Variations document objects now allow the cost code to be displayed as code only, description only, or both code and description. This can be changed by editing the relevant document template and by the end user of the template.
Code Format - Contract Deliverables

5) If a budget document will create a new budget version on signoff, do not allow the current approved budget version to be selected. This was crucial to make sure you didn't create a zero sum budget change which was not the intention of the end user and is linked to item 3 above.

6) Issue Selector document object now allows multiple issues to be selected. This is a game changer as you can now link in all site issues that relate to a variation rather than being limited to one only. The integration of issues with variation valuations, emails and approvals means that a UniPhi project manager is way ahead of the rest of the built environment when it comes to explaining why costs have changed and an adjusted contract sum is what it is.

Document Select - Multiple Issues
Multiple Issues Document Output

7) Progress Claim document object will now include Organisation name in the Supplier list.

8) An upgrade of the PDF engine to remove the annoying double line on tables that would appear on screen but not when printed.

Each release will continue to  enhance and improve the document objects that can be used in UniPhi to get the data you have gone to the trouble of adding out and presented in a neat way. Find out more on our LinkedIn and Twitter.