UK asset finance software specialist CHP Consulting has just
released ALFA v5, the latest version of its flagship end-to-end
software ALFA.
Officially introducing the new version earlier this month at
London’s iconic Gherkin, CHP Consulting’s sales and marketing
director Andrew Denton said: “Based on what the industry told us,
we decided to change ALFA’s technical platform to make use of new
technologies so we could deliver more.”
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The company explained that, compared to ALFA’s previous version
v4, v5 is a “technology refresh” rather than a new functional set,
because the system has been on the market for over twenty years and
is therefore “already mature”.
“Rather than starting from scratch with a new product, which
would have meant having no clear upgrade path for our existing
customers, confusing new customers and throwing away our heritage,
we decided to maintain the entire functional heritage built into
ALFA over two decades,” Denton said.
Key features of v5 compared to previous versions include a new
technology stack, an end-to-end presentation layer, enhanced
functionality with respect to its multi-lingual and multi-GAAP
capabilities, transportability and what Denton called a “really
sexy” interface.
He said: “These new technologies fit better in an enterprise
architecture, and create a class-leading platform for geographical
expansion. And because we wanted to deliver all of ALFA in a
browser, v5 is 100 percent web.”
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By GlobalDataAccording to Denton, there is also a “long-term” benefit to v5,
which he summed up as the opportunity to do “stuff that could
actually revolutionise the industry” with it.
One such thing, he said, are “intelligent” or “self-defining”
scorecards. These, which CHP is also about to release, allow data
mining using association pairs in a way that allows scorecards to
“modify themselves”.
In practice, according to Denton, they would work as it already
happens in other fields where data mining techniques are in
use.
For instance, by extracting data relating to buyers’ habits, a
US supermarket chain found that in a certain time frame, when
nappies were bought, so was beer, because fathers leaving their
offices would stop by and buy both.
The data mining picked this up, and the supermarket decided to
put beer next to nappies, which resulted in sales of both products
going up in that time frame.
CHP says now that something like that would become possible also
with scorecards, and it hopes that most lessors, that already use
them at the point of sale, will see the advantages of having
scorecards that allow them to have constant – even daily or hourly
– predictions and that could modify themselves, instead of
scorecards that only are updated periodically.
The company said that existing customers will just need to do an
upgrade in order to have the new version, and that many existing
and potential customers have reacted positively to v5, with a
number of them having already committed to it.
CHP’s customers in the fleet offering sector include fleet
management and leasing company Leasedrive Velo.
The launch of ALFA v5 follows two years of development and a £5
million investment.
