AASYS has the technology and products to mitigate the impact of the looting and riots Tragically, South Africa is in the midst of violent protests and looting. A number of provinces are being affected, and many businesses and properties have been damaged.AASYS (Advanced Automated Systems) believe they have the products and technology to prevent and contain any further damage.

AASYS is the sole distributor of LIOS products in South Africa. Using LIOS’s world-leading technology, fibre optic cables are deployed as a sensing and condition-monitoring solution fit for a wide variety of different applications – including the monitoring of the perimeter of businesses and buildings. “The acoustics technology allows you to distinguish specific sounds – whether it’s a truck or car, a group of people or an individual, someone cutting the fence or digging under it – and provides an early warning so you can react in time to prevent an incident,” explains AASYS CEO, Yoni Margalit. “In addition, this technology enables the monitoring of temperature near the fibre optic cable – ensuring the early detection of fires.”

AASYS is also the sole distributor of Dafo. The Dafo Wet Chemical Handheld units are extremely effective at putting out tyre fires. “As reported in the news, many trucks have been set on fire during the rioting, and we believe this product will be useful in preventing further damage.” Then there’s AASYS’s FOG microcapsule technology. The microcapsules contain a fire-suppressant chemical which is added to a paint, and automatically burst on reaching a certain temperature, thereby extinguishing an approaching fire at a very early stage. “The paint can be applied to any surface to make it fire suppressant,” says Margalit. “It's especially useful in this situation to protect armoured vehicles, petroleum tanks, delivery trucks and shop walls.”

AASYS takes pride in offering the most advanced condition monitoring and fire prevention and suppression systems in the world.

“This technology enables clients to save lives and protect assets, while ensuring businesses and industries stay up and running at all times,” says Margalit. “The damage is already severe, but we’d like to put our cutting-edge solutions to work to help prevent and minimise any further disruptions to our economy, and to the businesses which drive it.”https://aasys.co.za/solutions/dafo/

FOR MORE INFORMATIONADVANCED AUTOMATED SYSTEMS: www.aasys.co.za | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cape Town, August 8, 2018:  Africa’s customer experience leaders gathered in Cape Town last week for the 2 day Customer experience Management Africa Summit. The delegation of over 600 customer experience professionals discussed pressing issues such as generating a return on investment in cx, practical application of data and driving emotion to create exceptional experiences.  

South Africa’s customer experience professionals are slowly emerging as some of the best in the world, and the data is there to back this up.  

Sarina de Beer, Managing Director of Ask Afrika stated in her keynote “As mentioned right up-front it is a celebration year. Service levels are at its best ever…with satisfaction ratings of 91%, delight ratings of 54% and very low dissatisfaction scores of 5%. This is largely driven by technological advances and progress, with systems, and technological solutions, self help channels and chat bots in place to deliver bigger, better, faster.”  

Looking into how these results have been achieved, much of it can be contributed to the work customer experience professionals are doing in designing deliberate customer journeys. Diane Magers, CEO of the world’s largest and foremost association for CX professionals, the CXPA, elaborated; “Designing these deliberate customer experience is like building a bridge. Just like any team sport, it takes coordination and a clear understanding of the goals and it requires collaboration and contribution by all team members to ensure the bridge across the support structures is solid and consistent.  Building in silos or vacuums creates an inconsistent experience for our customers. Inconsistent experiences are one of the key factors commonly identified as a factor of dissatisfaction by many other organizations, particularly B2B, as a key opportunity to improve CX.” 

“The results presented by Ask Afrika were for me a great reward and justification for what we do, but great customer experience is a double-edged sword. The better you get, the higher the customers’ expectation and that baseline sets a new bar. You have to keep improving, keep evolving and stay moving when it comes to delivering exceptional customer experience. Finding and nurturing talent in the CX profession will be the next great challenge businesses face within in this industry” Juan Mouton, Portfolio Director for the Customer Experience Management Africa Summit.  

Grace Sikapokoo, the Chief Customer Office for AIG, South Africa spoke on this topic in both her keynote and as part of a panel discussion on customer centricity. The AIG CCO shared five steps to remain relevant and continually skilled; understand your organisation, understand you customers, understand customer experience management, understand technology and most importantly understand your purpose.  

The future for Customer Experience in South Africa is bright and there is much to be positive about, but the challenge will continue to grow harder, and the search for CX talent will be a driving competitive advantage for businesses serious about customer experience through 2018 and beyond.  

Follow @CEMAfricaSummit on Twitter and join the conversation using the #CEMSummit18 hash tag.

ABOUT CEM AFRICA CEM Africa is a meeting place for CX professionals and innovative CX solution providers. The show took place on the 1-2 August 2018 at the CTICC in Cape Town, where like-minded customer experience experts and the top CX solution providers gathered for an informative and educational summit with the common goal of improving customer experience across Africa. The event provides a platform for like-minded CX professionals to showcase their industry knowledge as well as solutions to better the customer’s perception of the brand.

ABOUT KINETIC Kinetic is an international business-to-business conference and exhibitions producer based in Cape Town. Our mission is to equip senior management executives with knowledge, market intelligence and viable commercial opportunities. Kinetic are leaders in providing business facilitation platforms throughout Africa.

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Released by:  KINETIC SA
Juan Mouton:  This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. 

Yvette Mulder – Solutions Development Manager at Alteram Solutions is a female force to be reckoned with. Having joined the company in 2014, Mulder is responsible for the development of solutions, applications and systems needed to operate the business successfully.  Mulder has added to the Alteram Solutions base of successful individuals that have made the company a force to be reckoned with. 

“There was no specific development environment at Alteram Solutions when I joined the company” explains Mulder.   She started doing research on contact centres and when the company got awarded the Department of Water and Sanitation contact centre project, she was primarily responsible for its development.  Mulder now has her own development team and Business Analysts that cover the whole system development life cycle.  For the last couple of years, Mulder has been focusing on software development related projects and tenders. 

“An important part of my presence in the company is to grow our employees and to share my skills and experience that I have obtained in my over 30 years’ experience in the industry – it is a vital component of our business and will only serve to grow the strength of our people and our business in the years to come.”

“I am not scared to really stretch myself, to learn new things, to experience new ways of doing business and to extend the boundaries of what we as a society have always been comfortable with – I want to reach, I want to teach, and I want to approach the entire industry with a new look and feel, while teaching my younger sprouts to grow within their professions”. 

A project that Mulder is currently involved in making smarter and more efficient is the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) contact centre project.  This project is made up of many work streams, challenging Mulder and her team to constantly find new ways to optimise the process.  “I am inspired by Alteram Solutions because I can contribute in growing the business as well as bring my skills and experience to what we do and deliver on a daily basis.  I get bored with routines, so I am constantly looking for new opportunities.  These are the things that give me natural energy and keep me going,” adds Mulder.

Mulder began her career as programme manager, but quickly climbed the corporate ladder acquiring programmer roles which allowed her to gain a wider perspective on how clients think, what their individual needs are and how different programmes work. She then branched into business analysis and project management obtaining a TOGAF (high level approach to design) certificate.

Looking at where she is now, Mulder has done development, system design, business analysis, project management and architecture projects from all domains. 

Outside of Alteram Solutions, Mulder is a mother of two daughters and tends to her mother.

During her free time, Mulder enjoys reading. She will also be completing her Cloud for Customer (C4C) certification this year which Alteram Solutions enrolled her for as part of its internal skills development programme.

Indie games are fast becoming a trend in South Africa, catching on from the overseas markets. These days, children and adults alike are playing mobile games as never before. People are always hungry for something different, which is where indie games – or ‘independent’ games – come in, providing players with something other than the mass-produced mainstream products.

Now, Somerset West can boast with its very own game studio that started turning its cogs in February this year. For its first month of existence, the studio was run out of the founder’s mother’s basement – typical indie game studio protocol, if history is anything to go by. Now, running from a house close to De Hoop Primary School, the studio focuses on creating mobile games (such as their recently released Afrikaans game, Fanie de Beer) and has oodles of style, creativity, skill and initiative.

While the Apmil Game Studio has only been up and running for a few months, the people who daily put their shoulders to its wheels have been building up relationships for the last three-and-a-half years. Even though the studio officially started up in February, the idea of an indie game studio had been brewing in the mind of Studio Head, Pierre Bezuidenhout, since 2011. Pierre started lecturing in the Animation Department of Cape Town’s City Varsity in 2011 – and this is where he met the three students who would later join him in this grand venture.

Pierre, as leader of the team, is Apmil’s Programmer and Technical Director. He has previously worked in advertising and animation for Wicked Pixels in Woodstock and held the position of lecturer at Concept Interactive as well as at City Varsity. His impressive skill set includes a sharp eye for detail as well as design flair and programming aptitude in different digital languages and platforms – he is also quite the people-person. Altus Barry is the Technical Lead, taking charge of rigs, renders and other related tasks. Mabet van Zijl did her major in 3D Narrative and, as Generalist, leads Apmil’s marketing and writing in between her usual workload. Louren Hattingh takes the roles of Lead Animator and Concept Artist. While each person has their area to lead, the workflow runs with a ‘rock-paper-scissors’-style in which one falls under the delegation of another while dealing with respective area-specific tasks. Sitting around a whiteboard, each armed with a marker, they discuss character design, story line, player motivation, level arrangement, time constraints and load division before jumping in with the actual development.

The first released game, Fanie de Beer, is a 100% physics-driven, full 3D, indie puzzle game with a distinct South African flavour. Playing as Fanie de Beer, a 12-year-old farm-boy, the player utilizes simple little rocks by tapping once on the screen to clear best friend Jaco Kriel’s fields of strategically placed, ancient landmines. Built in Unity, the game takes place in a single day – with the story starting early in the morning and ending in the evening – transporting the player through a dynamic day/night cycle and colourful, saturated farm fields as they progress through the 84 levels, meeting new mine types and increasingly difficult challenges as they go along. Written and designed in Afrikaans, then carefully translated into true farm-style English, this game is unique, fun and proudly South African. The demo is available for download from the Google Play Store, while the full game can be purchased on Samsung Apps and Amazon.

The next game in the pipeline is different from Fanie de Beer in virtually every way. Where Fanie is a very colourful 3D puzzle game with just enough back-story to set the player up for the context and flavour of the game, the current project is a heavily story-driven platform-game that takes place in a fictional world made up of parallaxing silhouettes and strange characters.

Apmil Game Studio has not only been created as a platform to build games, but also as a springboard for fellow animators, developers, designers and illustrators. It’s a breeding ground for collaboration, ideas, innovation and learning. Each person hones their skills while doing fun and challenging work through creating games and stories as well as fulfilling the creative needs of small to medium-sized businesses in the Western Cape and Gauteng.

Apmil Game Studio services include animation, app creation, game creation, rendering/stills, asset creation, video editing and UX. The creative division of Apmil, led by artist Janet Botes and writer Michelle Albinson, offers logo design, graphic design, online/web design, interactive design, writing, editing, proofreading and illustration.

Apmil prides itself on being different: Fresh ideas, innovative applications, strange and wonderful games – they are all things that receive the studio’s love and attention to detail. To find out more or to get involved, contact Pierre Bezuidenhout at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call him on 082 499 3133

Studio ingredients:[A]ltus makes the bus and [P]ierre drives the bus; [M]abet takes the bus t[i]ckets and [L]ouren makes the bus move. Thus, [apmil].

Free demo: Google Play – bit.ly/fanie_demo 
Full version: Samsung Apps – bit.ly/fanie
Official Trailer: Youtube – bit.ly/fanie_trailer 
Apmil page: Apmil/Fanie – apmil.co.za/fanie-de-beer 

Website layout and design isn’t rocket science…if you know how. It is intricate work though and requires the creativity and skills of a professional design studio. More importantly perhaps but often an oversight, is the assistance of a specialist online presence consultant to maintain the balance of both form and function - fundamental elements in effectively communicating the client’s message in an interactive and engaging manner.