Our Website Journey: A Year in the Making (Part 2)

Kiara Walker • April 14, 2022

Getting to the How

In case you missed it, Fisher Technology launched our revitalized website December 2021 with the sole purpose of giving existing and potential customers and partners the opportunity to get to know the real us. It was crucial to break down our extensive knowledge surrounding BPA platform and divide it into simple sub pages that allow visitors to find exactly what they need without having to sift through information that may not be as pertinent to them at that moment.


But why go through this? Why go from almost 40 pages to only 9?


“It's been a year since our marketing team brainstormed the first ideas, designs, and ultimately the direction we wanted to take our brand in and with the finished product in our hands, one of the best feelings is being able to look back at all the achievements, challenges, and highlights of building our website and telling a story from the ground up...” - Kiara Walker


Our previous website followed industry standards at the time which consisted of cramped, text-heavy pages made rather than the breathable, template style of layouts we see today. Back then, our goal was to work on using SEO to bring in more traffic to the website and grow our audience by incorporating many landing pages which were targeted by SEOs key search terms ranking our pages higher. Since then expectations, SEO best practices and design elements have changed to focus on being more content driven with simpler, yet eye catching elements. Now, design techniques such as including plenty of white-space, a cohesive color palette, utilizing relevant CTA's, and a responsive design that can adjust to a multitude of devices.


The Power of Storytelling

Originally, websites were geared to deliver information and have since been transformed to tell stories that visitors can resonate with.

We know what our product is capable of but really showing our audience how intuitive it is was something we originally lacked. To just to find a specific piece of content on our old website would result in clicking through about five to six pages of noise before getting to what you needed, this became a top priority. Tackling and completely revamping the content you see on our new site in tern making it easier to find the information you need.


Opportunities: 

Redeveloping our website allowed us to take the time to assess what needed improvement. Then we worked on turning  mistakes into strengths we can build upon as Fisher Technology continues to grow.  One of the major issues we faced on our previous site was something our team likes to call “feature dumping.” whereby the previous pages listed how the software accomplished the integration on a technical level. It meant that there was a clear lack of information on what tooling was built into BPA and the services that Fisher Technology offered that helped us stand out amongst our competitors.


The Approach: 

Part 1: Condensing

I wanted our new website to fully tell the story of Fisher Technology and how far it has come in the last 16 years. I spent weeks gathering ideas on layout design, figuring out the best way to display content, narrowing down how many pages we wanted to have on the site, and condensing years of information into key points that would best help our customers and  partners navigate to find exactly what they were looking for.


Part 2: Visualization
I was a bit nervous at first but more excited to build our website from the ground up and give Fisher Technology a fresh look and feel. Once I gathered enough ideas on how I wanted the website to look, I then took the next few weeks drafting potential page layouts via InDesign and incorporating techniques I had researched.


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    Page layout mark-ups drafted in Adobe InDesign.

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    Page layout mark-ups drafted in Adobe InDesign.

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    Page layout mark-ups drafted in Adobe InDesign.

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We wanted to take an innovative approach to the website by incorporating visuals to help us tell our story. On the previous version we realized how heavy the text was and wanted to circumvent our content. From the beginning of this journey, we wanted to include animations that gave our audience a visual gateway into key pillars of BPA Platform such as how the notifications and alerts function works and demonstrate how simple that process was just from the palm of your hands.

 

It was also important for us to give the face of Fisher Technology a familiar, but updated look, hence why we took the time to revamp the one and only- Penny Process.

Penny originally served as our HubSpot bot that lived on our previous website, but Joel and I decided to make her truly part of our team. I took time out from designing pages and turned to finding Penny Process and updated look. One of the inspirations I grew fond of was Lilly from the AT&T commercials and how we could use that styling in our own way.


We ended up going with the classic Fisher purple polo shirt and sky-blue slacks. My favorite part of Penny was deciding what hair color to give her and ending up with her iconic blue and purple ombre look as well as her pink aviator framed glasses to complete her look. 


Why we chose to step away from a HubSpot Site – the search for the right partner 

It was so insightful to be able to have the opportunity to connect with Chris Vendelli and the team at StudioPFG. They were extremely helpful when it came to the execution of the website, and we worked with them to take my website drafts and rewritten content and translate it to the finalized product we see today. In switching to Studio Vendilli, we gained access to a range of prebuilt widgets and tools that allowed us to fully customize our website just as we wanted. In HubSpot, the user-interface for editing the website left much to be desired and often presented more challenges than solutions. However, being able to live edit and publish on the fly are key things that sold us in partnering with Chris and his team.


You can check out Studio Vendilli here.

They were incredibly helpful in walking us through the site tools and sharing tips on how to truly make it our own when it comes time to maintain and update the website as we continually grow. It was like being on the behind-the-scenes tour of a feature film and seeing all the intricacies of what it takes to build the sets and go over lines before the curtain rises before your audience. 


In the next part of this series, I'll cover my key learning experiences, initial success of our website as well as what's next for Fisher Technology.

Don’t Buy the AI Hype — Buy the Honest Conversation

By Nicole Laurier • April 2, 2026
Sit through enough software demos and a pattern starts to emerge. Somewhere between the slide on streamlined workflows and the one about real-time visibility, the presenter leans forward and drops the phrase: AI-powered. The room nods. Someone scribbles it down. And the question nobody says out loud is — what does that actually mean? To be fair, AI is genuinely changing enterprise software. Real progress is happening in how systems learn from data, flag problems early, and cut down on manual grunt work. This isn’t an argument that AI is all smoke and no fire. It’s an argument that not all AI is the same thing — and that mid-market buyers are getting a raw deal when it comes to telling the difference. The Pressure to Lead with AI Mid-market ERP and CRM vendors are caught in a tough spot. Enterprise players have poured billions into AI, and their customers are asking the same questions regardless of company size. So “AI-powered” has quietly shifted from being a technical description to a marketing checkbox — something that needs to show up on the website, in the pitch deck, and in the renewal conversation, whether the product genuinely justifies it or not. This isn’t a dig at any one vendor. It’s the water the whole industry is swimming in right now. When buyers expect AI and competitors are claiming it, stretching the definition becomes hard to resist. The result is a market where “AI-powered” can mean anything from a genuinely sophisticated machine learning model to a rebranded reporting dashboard. Both might be useful. But they’re not the same thing, and they shouldn’t carry the same price tag. What "AI-Powered" Often Looks Like in Practice at “AI-Powered” Often Looks Like in Practice A few patterns come up again and again: Predictions that are really just history repeating . If a system flags a customer as “at risk” because their order frequency dropped, that’s not a prediction — that’s a report. Useful, sure, but it’s been available for years. Platforms like BPA Platform have delivered exactly this kind of data-driven alerting and exception reporting through straightforward business rules and workflow logic — long before anyone was calling it AI. The capability was always real. The rebrand is what’s new. Automation dressed up as intelligence . Routing an invoice to the right approver based on a spend threshold. Triggering a follow-up when an order status changes. Escalating a support case that’s been sitting too long. These are rules-based processes — and BPA Platform handles them through its codeless automation engine without needing a machine learning model anywhere near them. They’re reliable, auditable, and they work. When vendors slap an AI label on this kind of automation, it doesn’t make the feature more powerful. It just makes the buying conversation murkier. Generative AI bolted on rather than built in . The scramble to add large language model features to existing products has produced some genuinely useful results — and some that are basically a chat window glued onto software that hasn’t fundamentally changed underneath. The question worth asking isn’t whether there’s a generative component. It’s whether it’s working from relevant data, wired into actual workflows, and backed by someone who’ll own the problem when it gets something wrong. A Simple Framework for Evaluating AI Claims A Simple Framework for Evaluating AI Claims You don’t need a data science background to push back on what vendors are telling you. A handful of direct questions will do most of the work: Whose data is it learning from — ours, or a generic model? A system trained on your business behaves very differently from one drawing on industry-wide averages. What happens when it gets it wrong? Every AI system makes mistakes. How a vendor answers this question says a lot about how seriously they’ve thought it through. Who owns it when something breaks or changes? Features tied to third-party models can shift behaviour when those models are updated. That’s a support question, not a technical footnote. Can we see it running in a live environment? Demo environments are controlled by design. Asking to speak with a reference customer who uses the feature in production is a completely fair request — and the answer tells you a lot. So, What Should You Actually Do? What Should You Actually Do? None of this is a case for tuning out AI conversations entirely. Informed skepticism is different from blanket cynicism. AI is developing fast, and what isn’t quite there yet could look very different in two or three years. The vendors worth watching are the ones building seriously on solid data foundations — and being straight with customers about what’s ready and what isn’t. The ones worth being cautious about are using AI language mainly to justify price rises, paper over product gaps, or match a competitor’s latest press release.  Your business deserves sharper questions than that. Ask them. The vendors with real answers won’t mind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Full disclosure: this blog was written with the help of Claude, Anthropic’s AI assistant. Yes, we’re aware of the irony — a post about not blindly trusting AI was drafted with the help of AI. But that’s rather the point. Used thoughtfully, with a human steering the ideas, challenging the output, and rewriting the bits that sounded like a robot trying to sound like a person, AI can be a genuinely useful tool. It didn’t write this. It helped write this. There’s a difference — and that difference is exactly what this blog is about.

How BPA Platform Transforms Finance Teams into Revenue Drivers

By Nicole Laurier • September 8, 2025
Automation in finance plays an important role for an organization and is a key driver for moving the company forward. With the right automation tools, finance teams can directly impact the bottom line, accelerate cash flow, and unlock new growth opportunities. BPA Platform empowers finance professionals to transform from cost centers into profit generators, delivering measurable revenue impact across every financial process. From Cost Center to Revenue Engine: The Finance Transformation Traditional finance departments focus on expense management and compliance. But forward-thinking organizations are leveraging finance automation to drive revenue growth. BPA Platform enables this transformation by connecting financial processes directly to revenue outcomes, turning every automated workflow into a growth opportunity. When finance teams eliminate manual bottlenecks, they don't just save time—they accelerate revenue recognition, improve cash conversion cycles, and enable faster business decisions that capture market opportunities. This strategic shift positions finance as a competitive advantage and primary driver of company growth. Finance Automation with BPA Platform Cash flow is the lifeblood of revenue growth. BPA Platform's finance automation directly impacts your company's ability to generate and collect revenue by streamlining critical cash flow processes: Automated invoice generation reduces billing cycles from days to hours Intelligent payment routing accelerates customer payment processing Real-time payment tracking eliminates revenue recognition delays Automated dunning processes recover revenue faster from slow-paying customers Poor credit management doesn't just create bad debt—it destroys future revenue opportunities. BPA Platform's credit control automation protects revenue while enabling growth: Real-time monitoring identifies customers before they become collection problems Automated workflows prevent revenue leakage from account management gaps Integrated communication tools maintain sales relationships during collections BPA Platform transforms financial reporting from a backward-looking compliance exercise into a forward-looking revenue optimization tool: Real-Time Revenue Analytics Automated data consolidation provides instant revenue visibility Dynamic dashboards identify revenue trends as they happen Predictive analytics forecast revenue opportunities and risks Automated variance analysis highlights revenue optimization opportunities Strategic Decision Acceleration Automated reporting eliminates month-end delays that slow business decisions Real-time profitability analysis guides revenue-focused resource allocation Instant scenario modeling evaluates revenue impact of strategic options Core BPA Platform Solutions That Drive Revenue Journal Entry Automation: Revenue Recognition Acceleration Manual journal entries create dangerous delays in revenue recognition. BPA Platform's automated journal processing ensures revenue hits the books immediately when earned; eliminating month-end revenue recognition bottlenecks, enabling faster financial closes and more timely business decisions. Expense Management: Maximizing Profit Margins Every dollar saved in expense processing flows directly to profit margins. BPA Platform's expense automation doesn't just cut costs—it amplifies revenue impact. Expense savings from automation can be reinvested into revenue-generating activities, creating compound growth impact. Intercompany Management: Scaling Revenue Across Business Units Growing companies often struggle with intercompany transactions that slow revenue recognition and create compliance risks. BPA Platform enables seamless revenue flow across business entities eliminating intercompany transaction delays that prevent timely revenue recognition and business unit optimization. BPA Platform for Revenue-Driven Finance Transformation  The most successful companies don't just manage finances—they leverage finance automation to drive revenue growth. BPA Platform provides the tools, integrations, and insights needed to transform your finance team from a cost center into your company's most powerful revenue driver. Your digital transformation starts with one conversation—and the sooner it begins, the sooner you gain the competitive edge. Contact Fisher Technology to discover why organizations across North America trust us to deliver automation solutions that drive efficiency, agility, and growth.

BPA Platform: Bridging On-Premise and Cloud Systems Together

By Nicole Laurier • August 5, 2025
Organizations struggle with a fundamental challenge: their critical business data lives in two worlds. Essential systems remain on-premise for security and compliance reasons, while new cloud applications promise enhanced functionality and scalability. The result is often data silos, manual processes, and frustrated users who can't access the information they need when they need it. BPA Platform recognizes this reality and delivers what organizations actually need: a single integration and automation platform that works seamlessly across Cloud, On-Premises, or Hybrid environments without forcing businesses to choose just one deployment model. How BPA Platform Addresses Hybrid Integration Challenges Modern enterprises operate in a complex ecosystem where legacy on-premise systems must work harmoniously with cloud-based applications. This hybrid environment presents unique challenges including data synchronization, security concerns, varying communication protocols, and the need for real-time connectivity. Organizations require solutions that can maintain data integrity while enabling seamless workflows across both environments. BPA Platform addresses these challenges through: Tasks & Steps Framework - BPA platform provides the ability to build flexible automation processes with logical building blocks using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Comprehensive Tool Library - BPA platform includes tools used to create steps within a task, providing functional building blocks that interface with common technologies, systems, and applications across cloud and on-premise environments. Secure Integration - BPA Platform integrates cloud-based, on-premises, or hybrid hosted business systems using end-to-end AES 256 security with double encryption to protect business data and transactions. This security-first approach ensures that sensitive data remains protected regardless of where it travels. Flexible System Architecture - BPA platform can be deployed on-premises or as an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service). It uses client software to design tasks, a server for connectivity and processing, and a data store for data and tasks. Multi-Protocol and Format Support - BPA Platform empowers you to bring all your data workflows together, supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols including XML, CSV, JSON, HTTP, SMTP, OAuth, and more to drive your business forward seamlessly across different systems and applications. This comprehensive protocol support ensures that virtually any system can be integrated without requiring costly custom development. For organizations looking to optimize their hybrid IT architecture, BPA Platform's cloud integration solutions offer a proven path to success, combining the reliability of on-premise systems with the scalability and innovation of cloud platforms. Benefits of BPA Platform BPA Platform delivers comprehensive integration value through key capabilities that address critical enterprise needs: Reduced Development Time and Costs - BPA Platform significantly reduces system integration development times and costs while supporting integration with any data source. The platform provides flexibility to maintain, configure, and adapt data synchronization as business requirements change. Universal Connectivity - Connect to any SaaS or on-premises application or system through an extensive library of pre-built connectors and business process automation tools. This eliminates integration limitations and reduces implementation time. Scalable Architecture - Multi-instance architecture ensures reliable performance with multiple integration processes running simultaneously. Enhanced fault tolerance maintains system stability and business continuity. Flexible Processing - Support for both real-time processing and batch data integration handles different business requirements within a single platform, from immediate data synchronization to large-volume reporting tasks. Enterprise Security - Powerful authentication, access control, and data encryption protect sensitive information throughout the integration process, ensuring compliance with regulatory and corporate security requirements. These benefits deliver immediate ROI through faster integration development, improved operational efficiency, and reduced maintenance overhead while positioning organizations for long-term integration success. Hybrid Integration Excellence with BPA Platform As organizations advance, the need for flexible, secure, and scalable integration solutions becomes increasingly critical. BPA Platform empowers businesses to achieve true hybrid integration, seamlessly connecting systems and applications across both cloud and on-premises environments. Designed to support a multilayered, enterprise-wide technology architecture, BPA Platform enables complete interoperability between your existing tools and future innovations. This not only solves today’s integration challenges but also provides a resilient foundation for growth, adaptability, and the adoption of emerging technologies. By choosing BPA Platform, organizations position themselves for long-term success — with the agility to support evolving business models and ever-changing market conditions. Ready to Transform Your Integration Strategy? For organizations looking to optimize their hybrid IT architecture, BPA Platform's comprehensive integration solutions offer a proven path to success, combining the reliability and control of on-premise systems with the scalability and innovation of cloud platforms. Whether you're supporting multiple applications across multi-cloud environments, enabling digital transformation initiatives, or ensuring compliance with industry regulations, BPA Platform delivers the secure, flexible connectivity your business needs to thrive.  Ready to discover how BPA Platform can transform your organization's integration capabilities? Contact Fisher Technology today; we can assess your current environment, understand your business objectives, and provide you with a clear roadmap to integration success!