It’s been an exciting 2019 so far! Our hometown St. Louis Blues won the Stanley Cup for the first time in franchise history, and our St. Louis Cardinals gave it a good run as well, winning the National League Central Division Pennant. A big part of our year is traveling to trade shows and expos and meeting the people who are or will be using our services, this is possibly our favorite part of the business. We had a great spring with appearances at the ICMI CC Expo in Fort Lauderdale, Florida and at SHRM 2019 in Las Vegas, Nevada, spreading the word about the unparalleled accuracy with our forecasting, and showcasing how we are indispensable to HR when the need of absence management arises. In October we’ll be hitting the road again, heading up the road to Chicago, IL for ICMI 2019.
We’ve had a summer that’s been just hot enough to not be unbearable, and now the kids are all back in school. We feel it is now time to catch you all up on what’s been happening in the world of Pipkins, Inc. With the burgeoning interest in streamlining the workforce management suite, Pipkins has been working on improving applications like SwiftPik and eSmart to reflect the needs of human resource managers across numerous industries. eSmart has especially become front-and-center with our development specialists for improved experience.
In 2018, Pipkins, Inc. invited those in the workforce management world to “See everything,” with eSmart, IntelliTrack, and SwiftPik. eSmart, part of Pipkins’ full workforce management suite, is the application which allows for workforce managers to review employees’ attendance and adherence at a glance with it’s easy to follow graphs and time lines. The strategy laid out by Pipkins, Inc. is to create a tool that allows the manager, HR professional, or workforce management team to view employees’ actual times vs. scheduled times as well as an office’s deviation report, all on the same screen. In addition to the aesthetic streamlining, eSmart also allows the user to edit and alter schedules where necessary. The key word here is streamlining. Having these functions all on one screen certainly creates an environment where workforce management is more time efficient, saving the clicks and the struggle of toggling from one screen/one system to another and coordinating between all of them.
Other improvements made to eSmart include:
- New schedule controls to provide improved speed, capacity, and time bars.
- Enhanced filtering, search, and sorting capabilities
- Staff search functionality highlights and scrolls the schedule into view.
- Task search functionality highlights all matching tasks
- Filtering added for Staff Groups, Supervisors, Job Class, Departments, Task Categories, and Supplemental Events.
- Reorganization of action menu with grouping and improved descriptions.
- New schedule edit actions added.
- Right-click context menu added to easily access the Shift Summary Report.
These new improvements are expected to be released before the end of 2019, so stay tuned for more on eSmart.
eSmart is still front and center with our development team where we are currently working on edits that will allow even easier use with more visible bars, smoother transitions of time bars, and less verbose edit commands to navigate when wanting to make changes. To become familiar with changes that will be made to eSmart, or any other Pipkins applications for that matter, you can visit our website and log in to the training library. It is a collection of how-to videos spanning from Vantage Point to eSmart as they become available. These videos will be accessible here.
In other news, we’d like to welcome Alex Horner to the team. He joined us back in August as our new lead UX designer, following Gary Currant’s departure. Hailing from Tulsa, Oklahoma, he moved to St. Louis with his girlfriend who came here after medical residency. He spends his free time watching movies, playing video games, going to concerts, and playing the drums.
His interest in art and design shows in his work as an undergrad, working as a finish carpenter. He got his BFA in multimedia design from Rogers State University (go Hillcats!). He cut his teeth as a traditional graphic designer for a brand startup, and as time went by he became more involved in website planning. With the change in responsibilities came the change in title of graphic designer to UX designer.
Alex is happy to have come aboard Pipkins, and we’re all equally thrilled to have him join us!
Well, that pretty well catches everyone up with where we are as of September 2019. Keep an eye on the website for new content, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn if you haven’t already, and have a great rest of the year!