News
23 December 2011 :: Changes at Hindin Solutions
Dear Valued Customers,
Some of you might already know through various other channels, but please allow me to clarify the situation. Mark English and Tom Burkitt, after many years of dedicated service to Hindin Solutions, have decided to go their own way and set up a business together. Whilst this is a loss to Hindin, it is a great opportunity for Mark and Tom and something that they have wanted to do for some time, I wish them all the best in their endeavours and thank them both for what they have done for Hindin and our customers.
We have been planning this exit for a while and to help you all feel a little more comfortable I’d like to explain further. We have employed two other Implementation Consultants some time ago (Mike and Grant), increased our development team and we have been lucky enough to have retained Mark & Tom as consultants to Hindin. We have also begun the process of training up our first ‘Unison Certified Practitioners’, a group of skilled and experienced partners who can also implement Unison based solutions. The first externally certified people will be … drum roll ... Tom and Mark, but we have also started training some of the staff at Fronde. This will help spread the load and enable your needs to be met by other parties where necessary, more than likely under Hindin supervision.
The changes in the company also extend to focussing on getting some core product development done to extend the functionality of the Unison platform for the benefit of all our customers, I know that some of you have a long list of enhancements that you would like to see and I welcome hearing about them. The next year looks incredibly busy for Hindin, and Mark & Tom will be helping us out wherever possible. There are some exciting things happening here at Hindin, all targeted at better serving your needs and I look forwards to updating you in the near future, in the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Finally, have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Kind Regards,
Neil Fletcher
Chief Executive
Hindin Solutions Limited
Unit 13 Carlton Mews, 21 Bealey Avenue
P.O. Box 1181, Christchurch, New Zealand
Ph: +64 3 365 3200
http://www.hindin.co.nz
7 October 2011 :: Neil Fletcher appointed as new Hindin Solutions CEO
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New Zealand software firm Hindin Solutions Ltd is pleased to announce the appointment of Neil Fletcher to the role of Chief Executive Officer. The appointment is a key milestone in a continued growth strategy that has seen Hindin double in size over the past three years. During this time, current Hindin General Manager Mark English has held the joint role of running the business as well as managing Hindin's customer project delivery. Hindin has recently added to its team of implementation consultants and Mark will move to a new role managing that growing team. |
Neil Fletcher joins Hindin after 7 years working for smart energy metering firm Arc Innovations Ltd, where he was both Chief Technology Officer and General Manager of Technology Services. At Arc, Neil helped to bring smart meters to New Zealand on a commercial basis, the first company to do so worldwide.
Prior to Arc, Neil has spent many years working internationally in product development at Motorola, Lucent Technologies and Tait Electronics, developing new technologies and products to enable customers to achieve their business goals. Neil brings a wealth of experience and a keen interest in commercialising technology coupled with a strong business acumen, effectively bridging the gap between technology and business needs.
When not working Neil enjoys all that New Zealand has to offer with his family and can be seen regularly on his road bike suffering in the Port Hills near Christchurch.
Neil joins the company officially on 17th October.
About Hindin Solutions Ltd:
Hindin Solutions Ltd is a leading provider of service delivery solutions to organisations in the government, education and commercial sectors. Hindin are the makers of the Unison Enterprise Workflow Platform which underpins flexible Enterprise solutions for Contact Centres, Stakeholder Engagement, Contracts Management and many other real-world scenarios.
20 September 2011 :: New Hindin Offices
It has been a year since the first of the Christchurch earthquakes. A year of “interesting times” and one that we will never forget. In July Hindin moved into our fourth office of the year and the plan is stay put for a while! We are not the only Christchurch company to be affected by the earthquake, in many ways we got off very lightly and for that we are thankful.
Hindin is also proud of the fact that none of our clients had even one second of service interruption resulting from the various events in Christchurch. In fact the reaction from all of our customers was fantastic and while we have thanked you all before your support is still appreciated greatly. In case you don’t know our new physical office address is:
Hindin Solutions Limited
Unit 13 Carlton Mews
21 Bealey Avenue
Christchurch
Our postal address, phone number and website are all still the same:
P.O. Box 1181
Christchurch
New Zealand
Phone: (+64/ 0)3 365 3200
WWW: http://www.hindin.co.nz
Once again it is be time to update the physical address details for Hindin in Kbase/Unison/Koru/HIYA/FRED/GOTCHA/TUI/Home Base (or any other of those great names for our software!)
20 September 2011 :: Welcome Two New Staff, Farewell One
We are pleased to welcome two new members to the team while farewelling one who has been with us for over five years. Our new implementation consultant Mike Dugdale started at Hindin at the beginning of September. Mike has spent the last ten years working as a project manager/business consultant for two different companies involved in software for large financial organisations. In what can only be described as “quite a coincidence” Mike graduated with a degree in Plant Biology at the University of Wales in the same year that another of our consultants - Tom Burkitt - started his Masters in Biology at the same university. Mike went on to complete an MA in Banking and Finance. Married with a young daughter, Mike lives on a lifestyle block in Loburn, Canterbury.
Brian Kim has decided to seek his fortune overseas and will finish his Software Developer role with Hindin at the end of September. (He actually left Christchurch a few weeks ago and has only made it as far as his parents’ house in Auckland thus far. Bets are being taken on how long Mum’s cooking will keep Brian in the country!). Brian joined Hindin straight from University and has matured into a very strong developer. While we are sad to see him leave we can’t help but wish him the very best for his future.
We have hired a new developer to replace Brian: Ces Barra joins us on September 18 having arrived the day before from Singapore. Ces is originally from the Phillippines and has lived in Singapore for four years. He and his wife have chosen to make New Zealand their new home and visited Christchurch in the dead of winter to ride some shakes and find employment. We were really impressed by this level of dedication and are thrilled that Ces chose to join Hindin. Ces has a BSc in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of the Phillippines and has been developing in .NET for 8 years.
17 March 2011 :: Hindin Earthquake Update #2
Thank you all again for the continuing messages of support and understanding about the difficult working environment here in Christchurch.
This email is to update you on what we are doing and planning. Firstly we are not able to enter our recently acquired offices - so once again we are all working from home, which - apart from kids using the internet for playing games - is working reasonably well. We are actively seeking offices to bring the team together (preferably in the NW of Christchurch near the airport).
In the meantime we are fully Skyped, cellphoned and using a variety of cloud services to get the work done. I suspect that even with a new office we will remain very flexible about working arrangements as the traffic in the suburbs is appalling now.
The Hindin phone number (03 365 3200) is now redirected so feel free to call us about issues etc. Kind regards - Mark English, General Manager, Hindin Solutions Ltd
24 February 2011 :: Hindin Earthquake Update
It has been a long week for us here in Christchurch, and we thank you all for the support and best wishes we have received subsequent to the earthquake two days ago.
The city has been slowly coming back to life however all of the Central Business District remains closed - and as luck would have it this includes the Hindin offices.
We have restored our essential infrastructure (so email, www and our own Unison system are up and running) and over the next few days we will restore all infrastructure into the cloud also.
In the meantime normal support service has resumed, so please continue to use our standard support email address - our personal emails are all working too. The phone line is diverted to a staff members cell phone for the foreseeable future.
Thank you for being a fan of Unison and taking part in our User Group – and rest assured it takes more than a shaking planet to stop Hindin! Cheers - Mark English, General Manager, Hindin Solutions Ltd
15 January 2011 :: Grant Wells joins Hindin Solutions
As an Implementation Consultant, Grant joins the team of Mark English and Tom Burkitt in helping develop new applications in Unison. With a strong technical exposure plus business and management experience across both Governmental and private organisations Grant has the ability to translate user requirements into productive applications.
Grant is married and lives on a lifestyle property a long way out of Christchurch. His two young sons are proud of the fact that Dad has more motorcycles than Mum has horses!
16 November 2010 :: Stakeholder Engagement System for Proposed Highway
Having completed a Phase 1 Consultation on a proposed new highway known as the Puhoi Wellsford project, the New Zealand Transport Agency has today entered into Phase 2 of the consultancy. The programme is structure to:
In designing to meet these objectives the consultation programme is structured to:
- assist in the public profile of the project
- get clarity on community and agency stakeholder perspectives on key strategic design issues;
- ensure coverage of all affected and interested parties in targeted consultations where there is a specific match between consultee and the subject of the consultation;
- provide appropriate time for on-going contacts with agencies and other parties who have high influence and high interest, and allow for intensive working with potentially affected landowners to ensure that the design process is as fully informed as possible on local issues and opportunities.
Hindin Solutions is proud to have developed a stakeholder engagement system known as “Tui” during the past few weeks to enable NZTA and the project team to manage this process. The additional win for the customer is that “Tui” is built within an NZTA wide shared Unison platform so NZTA can assess stakeholder engagement across the agency and service delivery projects.
6 December 2010 :: Exciting New Product - Unison User Group
Before we get to the end of another very busy year we thought we would take advantage of our new web conferencing software and run two lunchtime user group sessions:
Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 1pm & Wednesday, December 15 at 12.00 Midday
Each session will contain two 15-minute presentations:
Part 1: Mapit Designer is a stand-alone version of a part of Unison that we call Structured FAQ. Mapit enables you to graphically design Decision Trees or Answer Paths that are published as web based Question and Answer pages. Each time a question is answered, the user is directed to another question (or more information) based on the previous answer. Mapit:
- Can create very sophisticated trees and can even link one decision tree to the next
- Is specifically designed for customer service and call centers
- Is often used as a front end for content management systems (you can easily change the scripts to point to different documents).
Scott Andrew was until recently a KnowledgeBase Administrator at the New Zealand Transport Agency. Scott utilised Mapit as part of his role, not only will he demonstrate how easy Mapit is to use but he will also discuss how it lead to a significantly reduced training time for new CSRs, and a dramatic reduction (to zero) in the amount of paper on CSRs' desks.
If you wish to take a look at Mapit in action at any time go to http://www.mapitdesigner.com
Part 2: In the second part of the program, Hindin GM Dr Mark English will give an overview on some of the cool new features developed in Unison over the past year. Included will Web Self Service( dynamic answering of questions/FAQs to users of your website), starting a workflow from an email, Customisable Fields, and Creating Grids in workflows and forms.
1 December 2010 :: Christchurch September Earthquake Update
Thanks to all of you who sent their thoughts after the September earthquake, we really did appreciate the warmth and caring you displayed. As many of you know we have been in temporary accommodation since the earthquake - despite our building being perfectly intact - so we are very pleased to be moving into our new premises at 79 Hereford Street, Christchurch this week. All of our other contact details remain the same but it might pay to update the physical address details for Hindin in Kbase/Unison/Koru/HIYA/FRED (or any other of the quite groovy names for our software!) Paul Sapsford - Leader, Business & Strategy
30 November 2010 :: Hindin Welcomes New Staff Member Santiago Alvarez
Santiago is Hindin’s new developer working on Unison with Steve Pankhurst and Brian Kim. Santiago uses .NET, C# and ASPX in his day to day work but is also a whiz with Javascript and has user design expertise that will help us make a better product set.
Born in Brazil, Santiago has lived in New Zealand for the past several years. He has already shown us a predilection for cola drinks and large motor-cycles
1 September 2010 :: New Case Management System Prototyped
Hindin Solutions is proud to be working on prototyping a new case management system on the Unison platform for our very good client, the Ministry of Education.
The cases being managed are for children requiring special education services. Core to the Unison functionality is the ability to put the child at the centre of the management system, enabling services to be managed and measured with the child’s best interests foremost. In addition to a secure online Case Management System, the project will also prototype the use of a tablet PC for taking cases and data offline and synchronising on return.
Initially the prototype will be rolled out over two centres in Porirua and Dunedin.
9 March 2010 :: Rapid implementation of a new Roading System at the Auckland Motorway Alliance
The AMA needed to replace existing software which managed road works due to its high total cost of ownership. Hindin's Unison solution was cost-effective and implemented rapidly in just six weeks. It not only allows greater control over the closure booking and activation process, but gives greater visibility to all Contractors, the AMA and future road users about what is happening across the Auckland Motorway Network. Doris Stroh, the AMA's Network Traffic Control Manager explains "the new software helps us to minimise the impact of road works while still maximising the work to be achieved within those closures". Click here to view the full case-study.
5 March 2010 :: Hindin User Group goes regional
The next Hindin User Group event on 24 March 2010 will be held in four regions - Auckland, Palmerston North, Wellington and Dunedin and each will be linked via a video conferencing facility. We'll have a presentation from an expert user on implementing Unison to solve business problems, a discussion where we expect to hear our customers' thoughts on strategic product direction and we'll release the new - exclusive - User Group resource site.
This is an invitation only event for current Hindin customers, for further information please contact your nearest Hindin office.
1 March 2010 :: Hindin welcomes new employee Tom Burkitt
Hindin is very pleased to announce the recent appointment of Tom Burkitt to the role of Implementation Consultant. Tom is an experienced project manager for technology implementations, business improvement and planning.
Tom joins Hindin from his most recent role at MWH New Zealand where he was the Group Manager for the Planning and Science team of 15 professionals in Christchurch. During his eight years at MWH, Tom managed and participated in the implementation of several critical business systems, including; a global Knowledge Management implementation, Asset Management Information Systems, and he managed several initiatives that rapidly and iteratively delivered comprehensive Activity Management Plans. Prior to MWH Tom was a project manager, trainer and project co-ordinator for several organisations in the UK involved in ICT and environmental engineering technologies and he has a B.A. (Hons) in Biological Sciences (Zoology) from Oxford University.
As an Implementation Consultant at Hindin, Tom will design and deliver fit-for-purpose solutions drawing on his considerable expertise in change management, project management and knowledge management systems. Tom comments, "It's a rewarding feeling to have joined Hindin and its clever team and strong circle of client advocates. With exciting product enhancements underway and a strong vision for where we're heading, I am thoroughly looking forward to getting stuck in with our customers to further enhance their way of working".
19 January 2010 :: The University of Otago has recently selected Hindin's Unison Solution
We are very pleased to announce a recent success - the University of Otago has selected Unison to manage its HR processes and information for University staff. Their decision to implement a new system came from a customer services initiative which identified the university required a Knowledgebase. After a gruelling tender processes Unison won!
10 December 2009 :: Hindin's Unison solution drives pro-active decisions at the Auckland Motorway Alliance
Hindin implemented Unison's CRM solution at the newly formed Auckland Motorway Alliance (AMA) - a fully customisable and scaleable solution built to support contact centres call handling, call logging, tracking, assigning, monitoring and issue resolution. Working to tight deadlines the implementation took just 6 weeks and was delivered on-time and on-budget. "It was great working with Hindin - they have excellent knowledge and were very accommodating and patient throughout the implementation and continue to be helpful and supportive now that we're live. We are already recommending them to other organisations" Rosalind Brown, Stakeholder Communications Manager.
The AMA are using Unison to support their Help Desk and also, as an added benefit, to get a grip on their business and understand what their stakeholders want from them through analysing trends and monitoring service levels. "We're using the system to not only handle the day-to-day calls and emails but also to analyse trends and measure service levels so we are continuously building knowledge in order to be more pro-active in driving our decisions." Click here to view the full case-study.
21 July 2009 :: Hindin expands its 'Horizon'
We are proud to announce Horizons Regional Council as our newest local authority client, adding to our long list of public sector clients. Their Unison system (dubbed 'Regi') has been deployed with their customer service department who aim to achieve 80% or more first-call resolution within a year. Hindin is pleased to offer Horizons Regional Council a rental licensing model, Which is very flexible and easy for customer implementation and uptake.Kaye Arnott, Corporate Information Manager at Horizons Regional Council says "Unison Touchpoint has just been implemented in our customer services department and has already proved to be a fantastic tool for providing access to a wide range of information through a single portal, thus helping our customer service team provide very efficient and effective service . Our aim is to resolve as many customer queries at the first point of contact as possible ". She adds further "It (Unison) is a very customer-focussed system and I have been very pleased with the implementation management and training offered by the Hindin team".
21 April 2009 :: Juggling contracts for profits
Mark English of Hindin offers his expertise on Contracts Management with his article 'Juggling contracts for profit' that appears in the Channel Magazine - April 2009 issue. In this he shares his trade secrets with respect to effective contract management from first step to the last. Click here to view the full article.