Applications Division has been acquired by Access Group

I am delighted to share the news that the Business Applications Systems Solutions (Bass) part of Atlas Group has been acquired by Access Group, the UK author of Access Dimensions. As a result of these changes the whole of our Atlas applications team are also joining Access.

Access Group decided on this strategic move because of the strength of our service quality, expertise and reputation in providing our customers with successful business systems. In joining Access we now have available for you an even greater depth and breadth of products and services expertise to support and develop great solutions and services for an ever-growing spectrum of clients across many sectors and critical business functions.

The whole board of Atlas universally endorsed this teaming up with Access after twenty years in a very successful business partnership together, because we are certain that the combination of business software applications capability of the expanded Group really will deliver substantial benefits to our customers' organisations in terms of added choice, value and operational performance gains they will want to make over the next several years.

Our valued customers can be immediately assured, as well, that their current relationships and contacts will continue with the existing people of the Atlas team, regardless of whether their need is for applications or 'technicals' assistance for whichever products and services we provide to them. In addition, our applications consultants will have access to the whole wider pool of several hundred Access specialists for both support and projects.

Therefore, the main point of contact for our customers will remain the current staff they already know well:

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  For clients who prefer email to raise support queries your existing addresses continue to work and you can also now use support.atlas@theaccessgroup.com when you believe that it is an 'applications' rather than IT infrastructure or networking issue.
  
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  For those who usually make initial contact to our office by phone for business function/applications related matters, then in the interim period please continue to call 0333 666 3330 where there will be an option to contact the Access team. Over the course of the next few weeks the team will be moving to a new office, the telephone number for which will be communicated to you beforehand. (For the many of you who also depend on us for technical IT infrastructure and networking support, you should continue using the 0333 666 3330 number you are used to - so no change there.)
  

I have especially enjoyed working with all of our clients over the years (the many years with many of them!) and we look forward to continuing our relationship with everyone as part of Access Group.

John Butler

Managing Director

Atlas Business Group

Atlas has all of their ducks in a row

Recently an expectant duck decided that the garden at Atlas’ Head Office in Nantwich would be the ideal place to build a nest. The pleasant garden surroundings attracts different types of wildlife all year round, but we rarely receive a visit from ducks. With the high walls protecting her from wind, traffic and most predators, and the pond conveniently available for a quick dip; the Atlas team adopted her and she became affectionately known as 'Jemima'.


Jemima made her nest in a quiet corner just outside the techies office and not too long later she was incubating some eggs. One colleague reported that they heard the duck quack “have you tried turning it off and on again” as a consequence of sitting within earshot of the technical helpdesk team. The Atlas team spoilt her with bread several times throughout the day. On Monday afternoon we were delighted to spot that all eight of Jemima's eggs had successfully hatched. Jemima was particularly protective over the ducklings in the first few hours but now she is frequently seen going for a waddle with her babies all following not far behind in a nice neat row.

Payroll Event calms RTI nerves

Atlas ran 3 successful payroll workshops at the end of March and beginning of April. Despite the challenging weather conditions over 30 customers joined us to hear all about the Real Time Information (RTI) and Auto Enrolment pensions legislation changes as well as the year end process. The sessions were interactive with a lot of delegates raising their concerns regarding specific challenges that they face. Director Diane Lonsdale did a very good job at answering questions and calming people’s nerves. The workshop received almost exclusively 9s and 10s out of 10 customer feedback scores, and payroll managers returned to their office feeling significantly more confident on the subject matters.

Feedback included:

"Great course, Diane made it interesting as well." - Steve from Amberline.

and

“Thanks for a brilliant training session" - Ruth from Horizon Community College.

Attached are some photographs from the first Leeds event where 20 people squeezed into the Saluté suite.

There is sNOw Payroll Workshop Today

Unfortunately due to the adverse weather conditions we have had to postpone our customer Payroll Workshop event.  We have listened to our customers who had telephoned to raise their concerns regarding the snowy road services, and in particular whether they would be able to make it back home again!!

The re-arranged 1/2 day workshop will take place on Tuesday 26th March at our Nantwich Head Office.  We ran the same event in Leeds on Monday and it has received excellent feedback.  If you use Access Payroll and would like to learn more about RTI, Auto Enrolment and the Year End procedure then it is not too late to book your place.

Click here or call 0333 666 3330 to reserve your seat.

Customer visit results in pink hats for John & Joe

On a recent visit to a customer in the North West, Director John Bilyj and Sales Manager Joe Jardine were required to suit up and boot up in accordance with the factory hygiene regulations of our customer. They didn’t mind the boots they had to wear, or the overcoats, or the washing of their hands three times, or the alcohol antiseptic gel that was required, but the pink hats ruined their day.

Seriously, though, this is an indication of our experience and understanding of the requirements and customs in the food industry. Our BarRed product is used by companies all over the country to provide traceability and the logging of parametric tests against batches of product, and allows our customers, with a minimum of effort, to view what batches of ingredients went into which production batches, and where they were shipped to.

This is very relevant to all food manufacturers and processors in these times where the content of foods has to be verified and provable. Give Joe or John a call to discuss this exciting product. Tel: 0333 666 3330.

Are Women Better Managers Than Men?

Craig Cameron, IoD member and Atlas Group Director, considers the latest gender-based research.

A few weeks ago Kelvin Redmile and Craig Cameron from Atlas attended an IoD event entitled “out of the cave” in the fabulous surroundings of Booths Hall, Knutsford.

The speaker was top business coach Nick Robinson whose niche is coaching men in the leadership skills normally attributable to the very top women managers. Nick started with two startling statistics. One, women are responsible for 85% of all purchasing decisions. Two, according to research by Harvard Business Review out of 16 key leadership criteria, women are ahead of men in 15 of them.

If that is enough to make you want to tear in half this month’s copy of Muscle & Fitness magazine then think again and if you read to the end of this article you will find where to get help.

Have a guess what was the management competence where men excelled? It was the ability to develop a strategic perspective. Personally I would have thought it was Drive but apparently top women managers are 12% more driven than their male counterparts.

On closer inspection of the Harvard Business Review article, and I must stress this is a personal opinion, the true message of the research is more subtle, albeit it is an excellent headline that makes you want to read more. Taking the direct comparisons the gap between men and women for the sixteen competences measured is not that large; typically men upper 40% to low 50% and women low to middle 50%. Nowhere is anyone getting 70%, 80% or 90% so is a true reflection not that women are marginally less useless at management than their male counterparts? With scores of 49% to 56% women are not perfect managers either.

Also is there a definite gender bias or something else in the statistics? Again a personal opinion (research funding welcome if you want me to gather the facts) but my understanding is there are relatively few top-level women managers and any person that reaches these levels has to be a truly remarkable individual.

This could create the statistical anomaly where the average women surveyed is more senior, and therefore, more capable than the average man surveyed. What might be getting measured is that on average because the women are more senior they are getting better results. The fundamentals behind the results might not be to do with gender but with ability.

If you want to draw your own conclusions the Harvard Business Review article can be found at

http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/03/a_study_in_leadership_women_do.html

Whatever the root cause there are things to be learned from how successful leaders operate and that is where Nick Robinson can help you to help yourself. If you are looking for a speaker for one of your company events I can recommend this man, especially if you want to create lively discussion.

On a more personal level, starting in February, Nick is running an online Personal Development Course that is one event per month for six months. Having spoken to Nick, and signed-up myself, the course material takes the best possible leadership advice currently available, from both sexes, and shows you how to apply it to your 21st Century workspace.

If you want to book the course details are to be found at

http://nickrobinson.org/courses/development-for-leading-men-1/

New Features for AFS Pro Users

Atlas are delighted to announce a new set of features for users of our popular Advanced Financials product, AFS Pro.

The latest .Net 4 version 6.04 of the product is now available for new and existing users. This version includes the ability to have customised layouts for your P&L account including subgroups of Sales, Cost of Sales or Overheads and to show Budget and Last Year variances.

The variance report format P&L Account is now a standard report within the system. You can also define a custom vertical layout based on an excel template so you can include % calculations and subtotals where you would like them.

If you are interested in this new version of AFS Pro or would like to discuss the product in more detail, please e-mail newsletter@atlasbiz.com or call Atlas' friendly sales team on 0333 666 3330.

We've Not Been Quarantined!

Contrary to recent reports (from staff), Atlas have not been quarantined, we are not the source of a new zombie outbreak, we don't think we are contagious, although it may look like all of those things and more are true...

Globe is merely undergoing a bit of a facelift, for which it has had to cover up. Please watch your step if visiting the premises.

Blown Away by Bentley

Sales manager Joe Jardine blogs about his trip to Bentley Motor Cars.

This month I attended a South Cheshire Chamber business networking event at Bentley Motor Cars. I got to meet plenty of business owners and influential people but the reason for this blog article is to tell you about the inspirational Bentley factory tour.

The event included a fascinating half hour presentation about the history of the luxury automotive manufacturer and how it continues to evolve, adapting to the latest challenges whilst still delivering their vision of developing and crafting the World’s most desirable high performance cars. This was followed by a two hour tour of their Crewe site. Unlike many other car manufacturers, Bentley design, build and sell cars from the single site, in a huge all in one operation.

Despite living less than 10 miles from the factory and having driven past it hundreds of times, I’d never set foot through the big fancy glass doors. The first thing that struck me was how spotlessly clean the entire site was. I was in a group of ten and at the beginning of the tour we were invited to stop any worker along our route and have a chat. Each individual we spoke to was extremely passionate and had a story or two to tell. These ranged from how their role has changed over the years to keep up with the latest technology and the extensive training they’ve been on, to the lavish customisation requests that they have received from rich extrovert celebrities. Personalised ‘his and hers’ crystal champagne flutes in the arm rest anyone? Or what about a £5k child seat?

Bentley are part of the Volkswagen Group. In 2011 they sold over 7,000 vehicles with the new Continental GT accounting for approximately one third of them. This is a huge vamp up in production compared to a decade ago when they were making a little over 1,000 cars. During the past ten years to keep up with demand they have introduced lots of new lean practices and machine automation to ensure everything runs efficiently. They have a number of quarter million pound machines that are programmed with certain shapes that are required for the interior trim. It was fantastic to watch the machine review a piece of material, recognise the pre-marked blemishes and then make the cuts to maximise the utilisation. That said, they still employ around 4,000 people with many more jobs at key suppliers dependent on Bentley.

Some interesting facts:-

• Subject to the amount of leather, it takes a highly skilled person between 5 and 8 hours to handstich each steering wheel.
• Bentley are expecting big things for their next car as they are entering the SUV market. Their concept car received the most amount of press interest at the recent Geneva show.
• Bentley is the jewel in the VW Group crown. The VW Group also includes Audi, Bugatti, Lamborghini, Porsche, Seat, Skoda and Volkswagen.
• Rolls Royce who previously owned Bentley, chose to build the factory in Crewe because of the good railway links, the skilled workforce and for the cloud cover to help protect them from bombing raids! At that stage they were building aeroplane engines to help with the war efforts.
• Bentley have won the Le Mons 24 hour race six times, 1924, 1927, 1928, 1929, 1930 and more recently in 2003.
• Bentley source their veneers from Atlas customer, Nantwich Veneers! Visit them and see the work they do at www.nantwichveneers.com

  

Bentley run organised tours for members of the public. If you’re interested in cars, luxury or manufacturing in general then I certainly recommend you take a trip. Click here for further details.

Right I’m off to sell lots of systems to earn sufficient commission so that I can afford the Bentley Continental GT.

All Tied Up

Liam Meadows wore a tie. We realise that a man wearing a tie perhaps doesn’t seem news worthy to most people, but when Liam walked into the office with his tie on it certainly caused a few dropped jaws. Rumours quickly spread about a court case but the real special occasion and reason for the tie was because we had allowed Liam out of the developer’s dark cupboard to join the sales team in a customer facing meeting.

This got us thinking... why do we wear ties?

After all...

• They seem to be a magnet for any spilt breakfast / lunch.
• They regularly take a dip in our brews.
• They are the frequent cause of “are you colour blind? / did you get dressed in the dark?” comments/insults from our colleagues on the very rare occasion that the colours/patterns clash with our shirt.

Would you be offended if we attended a meeting and didn’t wear a tie? We’d love to hear your comments.

Planning on moving office soon, make sure you let your ISP know in advance!

Our technical team blog about the importance of good communication with your ISP.


Over the years we've frequently seen customers suffer unnecessary and often lengthy periods of downtime on their broadband service after moving office. This is always due to the customer not advising us of the office move in advance, as they assume that transferring the phone line will automatically take the ADSL service with it.


Unfortunately this is not how it works, and by the time we find out about the office move, the customer has no DSL service and its too late for us to do anything about it. At this stage we can only offer to fast track the new order, at an additional charge of £150 to keep the period of downtime to a minimum. If we are told in advance, then we will always recommend the same process to avoid any loss of service.


First of all you need to ensure that a new phone line is ordered to go live at least a week before the office move is set to take place. Ideally it would be ordered to go live two weeks prior to the move, in case of unexpected delays. Once the phone line goes live we can then order a new DSL service on the new number, you would then effectively have two DSL services running at both the old and new office for a week, so the move could be done at your own convenience during this period.


Our DSL accounts are not locked to individual lines, so you would not need to reconfigure your router/firewall etc, and could simply unplug from one office and plug into the new office. As I'm sure you'll agree, this is a stress free way of moving your broadband to the new office, which is good, as office moves are often stressful enough as it is!


If you currently get your broadband through Atlas/C2 Internet, and have an office move planned for one of your sites, then please give our TSM team a call on 0333 666 3330 for further advice.

Milestone for Gary

Everyone at Atlas would like pass on our very best wishes to company director Gary Manktelow, who turned fifty during the course of this month. You're never too old for balloons!

Planning for the London Olympics

Craig Cameron blogs about the invisible technology layers we don’t see behind the Olympic games, how these layers might have been compromised in recent weeks and how better planning when it comes to employees could have worked wonders.

It is not the purpose of this blog to be controversial or highly opinionated but given the London Olympics is starting this week, and it is the biggest single sporting event that any of us are likely to witness in our lifetime, we had to include it somewhere.

If our purpose behind these articles is to be informative then what does a once in a lifetime event like London 2012 have to teach Atlas customers at large?
The company G4S has been in the news a great deal recently but we’re not going to focus on how or why they have allegedly failed to carry out their “believed to be” contractual duties. That is being covered elsewhere and we would have very little to add.

What we do want to highlight are the very real operational difficulties involved in getting 10,000 people from not-employed over to employed, trained, on-site, supervised and ready to go. Not only do we know about that but we are experts.

For example:-

• One of our customers carries out work on power stations, including nuclear ones. They have to recruit as many as 500 highly qualified people, each of whom has very high security clearance. This has to be done in around a two week period. How do they manage this? They use the Atlas HR Hub.

• Every February, and within a three week period, another one of our customers has to recruit nearly 500 seasonal staff, suitably qualified to work with children and vulnerable adults. How do they manage this? They use QlikView Business Discovery.

• One of our customers has 10,000 employees who have to be scheduled into, each week, nearly 900 different locations. It is a legal requirement for them to have minimum numbers of suitably qualified staff at each location before they can legally open the shop. A repeated failure to comply would result in a removal of the very licence our customer needs to operate their business; it can be that serious. How do they manage this? They use the Atlas Employee Roster Software, and frankly they would not have the operation they have without it!

• Another one of our customers who are in the food processing industry have to ensure that no-one (employees and visitors) who has been on a foreign holiday in the last three days enters their factory.

Then of course apart from employing hundreds or thousands of people you have to ensure they actually turned up for work. We have solutions for that also, including options that are activated by phone calls or smart phones messages i.e. no computer necessary.

Sadly none of this Atlas software or technology is in use at London 2012, but even without our super clever stuff, we are still confident the Games will be a success.
We know this will be difficult, but for a moment let us forget the London 2012 Olympics are happening this week.

Please ask yourself this question, how big a difference to the labour management in your organisation would some of this super-clever Atlas staff make?

Armed Forces Day is extra-special for Adam’s son (and new daughter-in-law!)

You may know Adam Wilkinson, TSM engineer at our Leeds office. His son, Thomas, was married on Saturday to Stephanie at a service & reception in Wetherby, north of Leeds.

What made the day extra-special is that Thomas is in the army and a veteran of both Iraq and Afghanistan, and Saturday 30th June 2012 was Armed Forces Day.

Thomas wore his full military dress uniform for the service and displayed his medals proudly. A joyous occasion for all concerned and all of us at Atlas wish Thomas and Stephanie our warmest wishes for the future.

Compilation: Well Wishes for Joe

Sales Manager Joe Jardine collates all of the 'well wishes' he's recently received from colleagues...

As plenty of you will be aware, I recently broke my collar bone. I'm lucky enough to have a bunch of supportive and sympathetic colleagues who have been chauffeuring me around to meetings and making my brews. They've also been finding their own ways to wish me well over the past fortnight...

'Sorry to hear about your injury, but why the chip on your shoulder?'

'Welcome back to work, I hear you had a cracking few days holiday.'

'I heard you broke your arm in 2 places, I would avoid those 2 places in future.'

'A man walked into a bar. He now has a broken collar bone.'

'It couldn't have happened to a nicer chap. You're armless.'

'If you think I’m going to make you a cuppa you can ‘sling’ your hook.'

'You're armless for a change... you're usually legless'

My Learning Experience With The Institute of Directors

Recently Atlas Director Craig Cameron went through the first stage of the Institute of Directors learning and development programme. Just in case you are the only person on the planet he has not told, he got the best possible mark, a Pass with Distinction. Here his report.

As you can imagine the Institute of Directors (IoD) has strong opinions as to what constitutes best practice when it come to running organisations of all shapes and sizes. Much of this is continuing from the recommendations contained in the various “independent reviews” set up by UK regulatory authorities to investigate and report on governance issues: Cadbury; Greenbury; Hampel ; Higgs ; and Smith. When you throw into the mix the well-publicised failing of risk management at RBS and their ilk in the years leading up to 2008 there is a substantial body of evidence to say that how well organisations are run is important and affects a much larger number of people than just those directly involved.

I know there are exceptions but many people become company directors because they excelled in their previous role. The significance of this? It is a totally different type of job.

For one, there are the contradictory forces of balancing short-term and long-term priorities. Second, the magnitude of the decisions are greater both in terms of the money involved and the duration. Third, the style of decision making is different. Hopefully, in a well-run operation all the information needed to make a robust decision is available. You might have to dig around a bit (shameless self-promotion – Atlas can provide you with award winning, market leading Business Intelligence software that will do just that) but my point is the information is available.

If you accept that strategic decisions involve complex judgements as to what the situation will be in 2 years time, then it becomes clear that information might be available but it won’t be what you are used to. Then include topics such as succession planning (only 15% of family businesses survive to third-generation), mergers and acquisitions (over 70% fail to create significant value)...and I could go on from there. As I said earlier, it is a different job.

The IoD is very much into learning and development and keen for their members to participate in their professional learning programme which has three levels of qualification; the Certificate in Company Direction, the Diploma in Company Direction, culminating in the Chartered Director programme. This very week I have completed the Certificate Examination, after taking part in a 6 day intensive “boot-camp” in February.

My thoughts about my recent experiences would be as follows. The 6 day “boot-camp” was tough going, especially by the time you reach the last couple of days. When I say this I don’t think that my brain is defective in anyway, but there was just too much information to absorb in the time available. Each of us left with in excess of 1,000 pages of Course Notes plus the cautionary tale that Exam questions could come from anywhere within that. Having just sat the Exam I can confirm that was good advice.

There are three exams per year, and laden down with over 1,000 pages of essential reading material, I thought that the March Exam would be too soon, so I went for June. To help me there was an excellent e-learning portal on the IoD web-site and I made sure that I found time to fully revise, every weekend, bank holiday and two weeks of holidays to be exact, and I was glad that I did.

The actual format of the Certificate Exam is 48 multiple choice questions in three hours with a pass mark of 50%, which does not sound like a lot, but wait and see the questions!
What is the biggest single thing that I have gained so far? An improved ability to manage complex decisions, largely due to having a better framework. That benefits me not just as a Director of Atlas but it also enables me to deliver greater insights to our customers when in conversation with their senior management teams about their company plans and ambitions.

The IoD is not just about learning and exams. Membership brings many benefits both on a personal and business level. The IoD does make available to its members many excellent resources and I would wholeheartedly recommend membership. There is a minimum criteria in terms of personal experience and size of organisation plus you have to be proposed by an existing IoD member.

If this is something that might suit you then please drop me an email craig.cameron@atlasbiz.com and I will be happy to discuss in more detail.

Craig Cameron, MIoD

Education, Education, Education

Ruth Doe from our Customer Sales & Support department blogs about being a first-time learner of Access Accounts.

 Having recently taken on some responsibility in the accounts department here at Atlas, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that using Access Accounting software was so much easier to use than the accounting solutions I have dealt with in a previous life.

After attending the same training Atlas provide to our customers – delivered by Keltha Borey, one of our trainers and experts in Access and ProspectSoft - all became crystal clear in no time. Keltha has the skill and wit of talking on every level from the very high end accounting functionality to the simple features that make users’ lives easier - and a good job too in my novice case! Keltha managed to take the usual “fear of the unknown” away very quickly and succinctly and at a pace I could cope with.

Training is imperative if you are to get the most out of your software and your investment. As some customers will be aware I have worked in the Customer Services department here at Atlas for sometime and often talk to users with hand-me-down training, rather than those who have been on an official Atlas course. So, if you’re in the same boat as I was, talk to us about having an Atlas trainer come to your offices and show you the quick and easy way to use the software properly!

Functional Features: Accruals and Pre-Payments

Atlas Director, Diane Lonsdale, blogs about finding out just how useful the Access Accruals & Pre-Payments feature is.

Amongst my many external commitments with clients, I have been tasked this year with working out the value of Atlas’ own deferred income for our annual audit. If, like Atlas, you raise invoices for work and services which span several periods then you will be interested to learn that there is new functionality in Dimensions 2.50e to make accruals and pre-payments automatically over a series of dates.

Sales and Purchase Analysis codes can be configured so when used on a detail line in SOP, POP, PL and SL there are additional fields to complete to allow the software to automatically post a nominal journal to reverse out the revenue or costs from the PL and post to an account in the balance sheet. Recurring journals are then automatically created to release the revenue/costs from the balance sheet to the P&L.

This, we have seen in practice, results in more accurate monthly management accounts and less work at the end of the year to work out any deferred income or costs – and less work at the end of the year is a very good thing indeed!

If you would like more information about how to use this functionality then please contact us on 0333 666 3330.

Nantwich Gets its First FTTC Connection

TSM engineer Stuart McKindley blogs about being the first person in Nantwich to get super-fast broadband.

Fiber to the cabinet (FTTC) is the new super fast broadband service sweeping through the UK, transforming the potential speeds of most lines that are enabled for this service. A great deal of work has already taken place in the nationwide FTTC upgrades, however we’re still in the fairly early stages and currently most of the UK is yet to be FTTC enabled.

It’s felt like a long wait for FTTC to become available to my connection at home, Nantwich was certainly not at the top of the list for Openreach, so with great envy I’ve spent the last 12 months or so ordering super fast FTTC connections for other people, while having to make do with standard broadband at home. But finally last week my cabinet was enabled for FTTC and a few milliseconds later i put my regrade order through.

The engineer that arrived to install my new master socket was pleased to tell me that my cabinet was the first to go live in Nantwich, and not only that but i was the first person in Nantwich to get FTTC. It is now all up and running and is noticeably quicker, and my speed test result showed that my line now had a downstream speed of 37Mbps, a lot quicker than the 5Mbps speed the connection ran at previously. If it follows the same trend as the other lines that we’ve upgraded to FTTC, it should also be more stable and less prone to BT related faults.

Unfortunately i expect it won’t be long till i get used to my speedy connection, at which point i will no doubt find myself getting annoyed whenever surfing on the Internet on a connection that isn’t 37Mbps. But hopefully this type of connection will become the norm for everyone soon as Openreach continue their nationwide installation of the service. The benefits to businesses of faster broadband are obvious, especially for those that require a faster upstream speed. If anyone reading this is interested in the new FTTC service, please don’t hesitate to call me for more information.

Stuart can be reached on the normal Atlas number - 0333 666 3330

The Atlas Team - Life With The Edge

Atlas customers may already have had the pleasure of speaking to new team member Mark Edge, who joined the company in the TSM team last month. Here's our introduction to Mark, in his own words.

I've always had an interest in technology since I was young... normally breaking objects and trying to fix them before anyone else noticed!

After various administration jobs, I took a job in IT, repairing faulty PCs and laptops. I started off without knowing what the inside of a PC looked like, but quickly developed the knowledge and skills to repair computers within hours, not the days it can take when dealing with some larger companies.

Taking this thirst for knowledge further, I am currently studying a foundation degree in ICT, to build up experiences of the different sectors of ICT, business concepts, hardware and networking, software development and website design. Some aspects of which will no doubt help in my job role within the Atlas Business TSM department.

The first few weeks have passed quickly and I am starting to get a grasp on all the different systems in use at Atlas, the knowledge building is progressing and this is when the real work begins...

My personal interests include both ends of the motor sport spectrum; from the high tech, glitz and glamour of Formula 1 to the action-packed, almost no-holds barred racing of the British Touring Car Championship. In addition to this I also try and play football and golf a few times a month, when the British weather allows it.

My other major interest is films. I don't know if this is a good or bad thing, but I will pretty much watch most films and normally end up at the cinema most weekends.

Everyone at Atlas welcomes Mark to the team, where we are certain he will be hugely successful.