When I first started in February 2003, the company had an old DOS-based Point of Sale system for Service Stations which was approaching its end of life, and had made the decision to invest in developing a new Windows-based POS. This was an exciting opportunity for me, as it was a chance to take my 8 years’ experience as a software developer for the retail fuel industry and use it to create something brand new from the ground up. In the 18 years since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the software product that started off as “my little baby” grow and our user base expand to cover every state and territory in Australia, as well as having sites in Papua New Guinea, Myanmar and the Philippines. 

During that time, our development team has grown as well, we now have developers based on both the east and west coasts of Australia. Our team’s skills have continued to diversify and improve over that time, it is my intention to keep pushing our team forward on that front. In business in general, the IT industry especially, if you’re not moving forward, you’re drifting backwards.  Our team needs to be constantly learning and adding to our skills to avoid this. It’s exciting being introduced to new technologies and seeing how they can be put to use to improve our clients user experience. 

The past 18 years has also seen the functionality of Beacon grow massively.  From originally being “just” a POS + back-office system to now being a suite of products including tools to interface directly with pump controllers, integrate with EFTPOS providers, retrieve sales from external sources, display live graphical sales data, to maintain the database for multiple branches from a centralised head office, as well as interfacing with well over thirty different third party hardware and software products. Every one of these new features introduced challenges and learning opportunities for our team. At times it seems that each new customer who joins us has a requirement for a new report, interface or process to be added to the software. This is fantastic as it means Beacon is constantly evolving and growing, while meeting the needs of both our new and existing customers.  

Last year’s acquisition of Beacon Business System by the Vela Software Group saw us take another step forward in formalising and improving our in-house processes regarding releases, testing and documentation. The result of this is that our users will see even more improvements, both to Beacon’s functionality, and the ability of our staff to assist them when required. I am excited to continue on this journey and look forward to seeing what the 2020’s will bring Beacon and our users.   

Kind Regards, 

Peter Szkiela