Broadcast live from our Tamworth headquarters, Crown’s annual customer conference coincided, as always, with our major software update – this year highlighting Version 17, released on the 5th May.
Over ninety packed minutes, the event spanned workforce analytics, support services, hardware and access control, managed cloud solutions, employment law and our product roadmap leading into Version 18.
Here’s a breakdown of each session and links to further details on every topic.
Compliance: what the Employment Rights Bill asks of workforce planning
Neville Henderson, Senior Consultant on our shift pattern design team, opened the conference with a discussion of the legislation. The bill is the most significant change in this area since the Working Time Regulations of the late 1990s, and it will roll out in stages over 2026 and 2027.
Three points stood out for operational teams.
- Statutory sick pay now applies from day one with no lower earnings limit, which changes both the cost of absence and the case for monitoring it.
- A late addition to the bill introduces a duty to record annual leave and holiday pay details, held for six years.
- The Fair Work Agency also brings together several separate enforcement bodies, giving it powers to inspect workforces, require employers to demonstrate compliance, and act for workers at tribunal.
Neville also shared two pieces of client work which frame how the market is responding to these changes. One organisation reduced its production week from seven days to five and a half in response to falling demand, keeping the workforce involved in how it was rostered. Another, part of the national government workforce, moved to reduced hours on the same pay under an annualised hours framework, with attendance requirements varying by hour, by day, and by whether parliament was sitting.
Read more on this: what zero hours and stable contracts mean for shift planning, the compliance panic cycle and our shift pattern design consultancy.
Version 17: what changed for administrators, managers and employees
The release was hosted by three Crown employees, each talking through different sections.
Systems Analyst John Newman covered phase one of the redesigned Manager Today Page. It’s now a configurable landing page, so a line manager with a team of ten and a site supervisor with several hundred staff see different things on login.
Solutuions Consultant Naomi Barlow took administrators and managers through geofencing, which sets a boundary around a location and either blocks or warns on clockings outside it. She also expounded on rolling sickness entitlement, which removes the manual checking behind layered sick pay policies. Finally, Naomi covered document signing, so employees can sign a return to work or a contract in the system, and people maintenance auditing, which now includes deleted records.
Karen Eyre, Senior Systems Designer, closed the section on mobile self-service: a notifications area with optional push, a calendar view of working days, leave and rest days, and shift swap, which in Version 17 can bypass manager approval where the rule allows it.
Read more on this: the full Version 17 release notes, time and attendance and secure mobile access.
Cloud, hardware and the platform underneath
Technology Director Harish Rao made the case for managed cloud services. His argument centred on three pressures that organisations running their own infrastructure absorb at once:
- Keeping pace with technology change.
- Defending against a threat landscape that keeps growing.
- Funding both of the above from an unpredictable capital budget.
A managed service shifts these responsibilities to a specialist team and provides a transparent operating cost.
On hardware, Carl Barsby, our Technical Implementation Team Tead, covered a change customers have been waiting for. Setting up a TouchStar EVO controller no longer needs direct SQL access, as configuration now runs through the configurator and web clients, removing the change control overhead and the dependency on technical teams.
He also covered improvements to the BioStar interface, the new TouchStar SECO terminal as a successor to the TS2020, and migration routes for customers running ATS Prodigy or Maximus 2 terminals, both of which have reached end of life. ATS People Point remains a mainline product with no plans to retire it.
Read more on this topic: why 2025 was a turning point for cloud adoption, our cloud-managed service, facial recognition and attendance and access control.
Turning workforce data into something people use
John Taylor, Solutions Consultant, demonstrated the Open Data Platform. Building live in-platform, he took a preset headcount report, used it as a template for an absence analysis by category, then created a skills report from scratch in about five minutes; filtered it, charted it, and pinned the output to a shared dashboard.
The part that drew most interest was mapping. For customers running multiple sites, employee counts, absence percentages and overtime can be plotted geographically and filtered by region or against a site graphic rather than a map.
Read more on these topics: advanced workforce analytics and the open data platform.
Support, and the road to Version 18
Sharon Wakeman, Functional Support Team Leader, introduced Support Plus for organisations that lack the internal resources to manage their Crown configuration. The point she returned to is one that most enterprise teams recognise: when a super user changes roles or leaves, they tend to take their system knowledge with them. Support Plus retains that expertise outside the organisation, with regular service reviews and a structured change process.
Chris Pollicott, Head of Product Strategy and Innovation, closed on the roadmap.
He also flagged a date worth putting in front of your infrastructure team. .NET 8 leaves Microsoft support in November 2026 and is replaced by .NET 10 as the current long-term supported release. Crown aligns major releases to that cycle, so Versions 17 and 18 sit on .NET 10, and Version 19 will move to .NET 12. A dedicated briefing document is following.
Read more on this: professional services and people management.
Also this year
Rebecca D’Agostino, Head of Marketing, opened the conference with the year’s assurance work: a new SOC 1 Type 2 accreditation, reapprovals for ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 with zero findings, Cyber Essentials, and continued supply chain assurance through Risk Ledger. SOC 1 Type 2 matters most to customers with a US parent company and financial reporting obligations. Speak to your Account Manager if that applies to you.
If you want to go deeper on anything covered here, your Account Manager can arrange a session with the team behind it.
If you are not yet a Crown customer and want to see how any of this works, request a demo.
