November 2018: AMX Annual User Group
Despite bad weather and challenging traffic, on Weds 7th November AMX hosted its largest User Group event to date, with over 60 customers attending the day at the Kendleshire Golf Club in Bristol.
Building on previous User Groups, we welcomed the return of the Customer’s System Demonstration and New AMX Features sessions, but this year we were excited to include presentations from expert guest speakers from Sheffield University and Rhonda Cynon Taf Council.
Owen Griffiths of Rhondda Cynon Taf led our first session, explaining how the implementation of Schedule 3 of the FWMA will affect Sustainable Drainage Applications for all Welsh Authorities from January 7th 2019. His presentation was extremely informative, covering the various standards that are required and the need for careful document management throughout the approval process up to and including the final adoption of assets into the Authority’s Asset Register.
The second session featured Dr. Fin O’Flaherty of Sheffield Hallam University sharing an overview of the current Inspection Methodology for Structures and how he and his team adapted AMX and AMX for Mobile to improve quality data and contextual decision-making during inspections in Qatar. As we also welcomed two international customers for the first time, we took the opportunity to demonstrate the system in use by WVB East End Partners for the Lewis Clarke Bridge in Indiana/Kentucky – expanding upon some of the unique applications they’ve developed to accommodate Defect Timeliness, Stock & Material Controls and Winter Maintenance.
A delicious buffet lunch followed, overlooking the 18th Green and Lake after which we reconvened for a brief overview of some of the key new features that have been added to AMX over the last 12 months, from which all our customers can now benefit. We also touched on some of the exciting future plans for AMX accreditations in 2019. It was then time for the well-established break-out sessions for Highways, Structures and Flood. The themes of conversation in these groups included:
• Highways – A detailed walk through of the HMEP Lifecycle Planning kit in AMX, which can be used to review and compare multiple treatment strategies.
• Structures – An overview of AMX Lifecycle Planning Tool, and in particular a demonstration of the new data export for the Structures toolkit along with a review of the comprehensive Structures Inspection forms available on AMX Mobile
• Flood – A working discussion on the new AMX Application Approval functionality currently being designed with clients to support SAB’s. These tools are being designed for flexibility to suit different customer requirements, and to be applicable to any Planning Approval procedures such as Structures Technical Approvals.
As ever the AMX team are committed to listening to our customers to help drive the new developments of AMX but we also see the Annual User Groups as an opportunity to provide customers with the platform to share their own best practice and experiences of AMX with each other.
Overall feedback from delegates was incredibly positive with comments such as “useful, informative and excellent variety of content” and over 100% rating the content as good or very good.
With next year being our 15th Anniversary we are looking to build on the positive growth so far and the expansion and reach of the user group, so do keep an eye on our newsletters for information about that so you can save the date. If you’d like to sign-up to receive our newsletter you can email “opt-in” to gdpr@amxsolutions.co.uk.