Thanksgiving leftovers are gone, the Christmas tree is up, and it's time for XBE to transition into winter development mode.
Each year, XBE makes our largest advancements to the software platform between December and March. As customer activity decreases with cooler weather, our product team has additional time and attention to give to new areas that require extended periods of uninterrupted focus.
This winter, we're focusing on a few key themes:
- Vision
- Communication
- Comprehensiveness
Vision
The biggest opportunity for most customers is to more clearly see the gap between the status quo and what is possible. While we've solved this problem in some key areas such as trucking planning & surplus, there's much more work to do. We need to pay closer attention to the way that we manually assess customer situations and ask how we can ask and answer those questions automatically. Most of the analysis that we're doing in our operations team can be converted into algorithms. Additional customer/operations/development collaboration in this area will produce excellent new diagnostic capabilities.
Communication
As vision improves, communication must also. Once opportunities are visible, it's the job of leadership to help everyone see what has become apparent to them. We can make this much easier by adding additional types of notifications to the platform related to anything worth knowing, and also by expanding the functionality of newsletters. Additional notification types will create renewed demand for more notification preferences, and so that will also be a priority. In addition, we'll improve the educational content and related features in the platform to ensure that all users know as much as possible related to their job responsibilities. We believe that people are smart enough, but they might not know enough. Our goal is to deliver the info they need when they need it.
Comprehensiveness
Some customers use the platform to coordinate all types of resources (materials, trucks, crews, equipment). Other customers focus on a subset of resources (trucks+). In addition to working with customers on related change management projects, we'll also be working on additional capabilities in non-trucking areas to even out the comprehensiveness of the platform. For example, we'll add support for time sheets for crews and equipment (now available for drivers), and we'll add additional export types to reduce job cost accounting latency for all resource types while improving administrative efficiency. While we're quite pleased with the progress that has been made to widen the platform's footprint, we're not done yet.
As always, we love to collaborate with customers as we work through details in each of these priority areas. Please engage with us in your #horizon Slack channel about anything that comes to mind.
Thanks for a great 2021! We're excited for what comes next.