ArchPulse Autumn 2020

Welcome to the autumn edition of ArchPulse in which we round up the latest news and online content from Arch.

Like everyone else we have needed to adapt our business to cope with coronavirus but I hope this finds you safe and well in these troubled times.

Our first priority is the wellbeing of our employees and customers. Please be aware our employees are following the public health authority guidelines when making decisions regarding visiting onsite premises or working remotely.

This newsletter focusses on Floe 210, our new release, and its integration with Renda.io.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Archpulse. Please let me know!

I’m pleased to announce that we shipped Floe 210 at the end of July. We are expecting our first customer go-live at the end of later in autumn which is very exciting.

There is more on the new capabilities in Floe 210 at floe.com/decision capture and a neat video showing off its features that is definitely worth 5 minutes of your time.

This is a good time to thank you for all your feedback and requests for added functionality in Floe. We definitely act on it! We now have a solid development list for the solution beyond 210 which will see Floe move to be not just a really powerful way of creating emails integrated with SAP data, but have many of the capabilities found in market leading communication tools that don’t integrate with SAP as Floe does.

On that road, Floe 210 is a bigger step forward for the solution than it might appear.

So far we have promoted Floe as a way to create gorgeous emails and replace functional, standard outputs from SAP. We made creating those emails much easier with the Floe Fiori-enabled email builder app in Floe 2.

What was striking in talking to users of Floe and prospective clients was the need to use email as part of a business process, not just for communicating information elegantly.

From release 210 Floe will do both these things.

The big news is that Floe 210 enables decision capture in email for any SAP process and does so very effectively. Throughout our work with eforms and apps we have been able to capture decisions. Capturing an acceptance is straightforward, but for a rejection additional information is inevitably required, so we need to prompt and check for that. Previously we have redirected the user to a BSP screen or even an eform or app, but always the best answer was to keep the process in the same technology.  With Floe 210 we can capture a rejection in an email and then use the power of Floe to process that. Users can set up Floe to offer a link embedded in the wording of the mail or present it as decision buttons, with ‘reject’ formatting an email reply. The reply is tamper-evident and Floe can be configured to chase decisions that are overdue.

We now have a highly effective, quick to implement solution for an issue that crops up every day, in every SAP customer.

Renda.io is our PAAS offering for SAP complementary microservices rolling out this autumn and into winter ’21.

Last year in Archpulse we discussed SAP’s default output option, Adobe Document Services, and how it combines data and a template to render a PDF. To offer an alternative output option this summer Arch showed the first customers Renda.io as a vehicle for a similar service. In contrast to the SAP option, Renda.io will create a PDF directly from an HTML file via an SAP function module.  We think this will be really helpful to all SAP customers who are working with HTML in email or Fiori and it will certainly be very affordable. All our products will exploit Renda.io ‘out of the box’.

As an example, thanks to Renda.io Floe 210 can now support PDF generation, so Floe emails can be sent with either a PDF equivalent attached or a completely different Floe-generated PDF. Varo/FLM customers will be able to archive off HTML forms as PDF and Stelo users similarly for Fiori content.

We are already working on customer use cases. It looks like there is a good case for output documentation in debt recovery using Floe. Equally, we can use Renda.io to capture CapEx sign-off in a PDF for an audit trail archive. We hope to have these examples and others ready to share with you in the New Year but for now if you would like a demonstration of the power of Renda.io we are ready to run a demo for you.

Renda.io will be our platform for many more transformation and conversion services. In the realm of printing, for those interested in Postscript output, Renda.io will support HTML to Postscript transformation as well as to PDF, so we really can cope with pretty much printer now.  The more we think about it the more use cases we come up with.

Renda.io launched last month and of course we will be in touch with customer briefings in the autumn.

Later this year we will enhance Renda.io to offer extension services for SAP chatbots, combining SAP conversational AI, Renda.io-based integration services and Floe for customer communications. If you would be interested in seeing a demo of that working there’s no need to contact us – just go on the website and get talking to ‘Archie’ our very friendly bot!

I hope you found this newsletter interesting. As ever we appreciate your interest and the business you place with Arch. Thank you!

Kind regards,
Henry Blythe,
CEO