The Cheque Is In The Post - I Promise!

The postal system in the local area of our Head Office in Nantwich has been thrown into complete chaos. Atlas have had instances of both post sent to us and items that we have attempted to post either going completely missing or being seriously delayed. Local residents and businesses have made an avalanche of complaints to Royal Mail since they closed their Crewe sorting office as part of their £2bn investment in modernising their operations. Postal workers have admitted that they are close to breaking point. The Post Office are reviewing their delivery routes and hope to resume a normal service soon whilst promising that they are doing everything to minimise disruptions.

We ask our customers and suppliers to be patient with us during this period. Where possible as part of our green environmental policy we try to communicate electronically but where we have to rely on the postal system we hope you can appreciate that this matter is out of our control. If you fear that we may not have received something that you have sent please give Ruth Doe a call. Alternatively, 21st Century technology has proved itself more reliable than a 19th Century postal system and if you would like to talk to us about enabling your business to pay by BACS then don’t hesitate to give us a call!

You can read more about the disruption by reading the Crewe Chronicle’s news article.

Breaking News

Those of you who frequently receive emails from Joe Jardine may have noticed that his content has been brief and to the point over the last week. This is because he broke his right arm on Sunday and has it in a cast and sling. So how did he do it? He has been telling people in the office all sorts of stories including saving young children from a house fire, and my personal favourite; that it was the result of a tough negotiation, but the truth is he did it playing football. As you know you play football with your feet and he is not tall enough to be the goalkeeper! We have since discovered his injury was due to his over exuberance of trying to stop the ball crossing his team’s goal line; as we know Joe does not like to lose! Sympathetic colleagues have been heard saying "that this is what happens when old men try to play a young man's sport".


Joe is unable to drive for at least 6 weeks and cannot demonstrate solutions so we are in the process of re-assigning people to his scheduled meetings. Joe has more x-rays on Wednesday where we hope he'll be told that the radius bone is setting fine and will not require plates or surgery! In the meantime Joe is still in the office and is available to discuss your projects or any new requirements. Hopefully you'll join us in wishing him well/laughing at him incessantly.

Flu Jabs - The Things We Do For Our Customers

Atlas has teamed up with our local branch of The Co-operative Pharmacy and has been able to secure some vouchers so that the Atlas team members can get a discounted flu jab. Whilst not compulsory, there has been a very good take up, so you’ll be pleased to hear that when you telephone during these wet and cold Winter months we will not only have people here to answer your calls but we shouldn’t be sniffling or sneezing either.

Atlas takes the health and welfare of its people very seriously. Our Atlas HR Software Package allows the management team to monitor absence levels and we’re pleased to report that we lose very few working days each and every year due to sickness. Tony Hutchinson, the Atlas Group Health and Safety Officer commented “This seasonal jab is proven to reduce workplace absence by up to 25%”. The flu and common colds account for over 90% of the UK short term illnesses and represents a huge cost in productivity. This particular jab also includes a strain of the H1N1 swine flu vaccination, which we’re hoping will protect our office from a serious outbreak.

Unfortunately however there is still no known cure for man flu.

If you would like to talk to somebody about HR Software Packages please do not contact our sales team on 0333 666 3330 or email customerservice@atlasbiz.com.

Horsing Around

Over the years Atlas has taken part in a number of events to help support the local communities and charities in Cheshire, Yorkshire and Glasgow. Our latest sponsorship proved somewhat controversial amongst colleagues, as representatives from the Nantwich office sponsored a fund raising event for Crewe Alexandra Football Club’s away supporters to help keep their cost of travelling to a minimum. Controversial because there is plenty of inter-company rivalry and banter regarding which team individuals support. This has been particularly tense recently with various exchanges of SMS messages and emails following Leeds United losing 6-4 to Preston having been 4-1 up and Crewe Alex drawing 5-5 with Chesterfield having been up by the same score.

Atlas were one of the key sponsors for the Travelling Crewe Fans race night. The race night proved a big success and was enjoyed by all who attended. Craig Cameron was the big winner on the night having turned a 50p bet (last of the big spenders) into £8. In between the races the organisers had auctions and bits of trivia to keep people entertained; Joe Jardine proved lucky during one such game (although he will tell you it was skill) when he beat approximately 100 other contestants in a ‘heads or tails’ challenge and correctly predicted which side the coin would land on 11 consecutive flicks. He won an extra large Crewe Alex training t-shirt, those of you that have met Joe will see the funny side of this.

'Proof that gambling doesn't pay'

'The Atlas Classic features on the race night program'

Why I'm Nuts About Time Manager!

Company Secretary Daphne Butler finds herself with little to do with Project-based work, but still finds herself using our innovative Time Manager software on a daily basis. In this blog article she writes about how she's found the solution incredibly useful, despite some initial concerns...

Atlas Time Manager is a very handy bit of Business Software. I never used to think this but I’ve had a dramatic change of mind.

Atlas first developed Time Manager as Project Management Software to keep track of time spent by individuals on jobs and this is the version we have installed in-house. There are other modules though with different functionality like managing rostering, or integrating time worked to Access Payroll.

Since I rarely work on projects, my time being generally split between admin, accounting and marketing, there was never really anything that I could enter that anyone was remotely interested in knowing about. So it wasn’t really worth my while putting anything in there. In fact it was a complete turn off.

But recently I’ve moved to a four day week and in advance of this was asked the question ‘how much of your time is spent on what exactly?’ In anticipation I began to use Time Manager ... ... ... in great detail ... ... ... and quickly began to realise that this was a grand way of managing my time and my jobs list. The discipline of tracking what I was doing was making me even more effective at what I did.

At the beginning of the day, I select the broad areas of work that I need (from the tasks box bottom right) and I drag them to the column under the day of the week (big box in the middle). The box bottom left is free text and relates to the task highlighted. So I make a note of the time and type in a brief description of the job I am about to begin ... ... ... like so:

•  12.00 - Create blog about timesheets.

When I finish the job I enter the end time. If my next job falls into the same category, I simply scroll down, put in the start time and description for the new task. If it is a different kind of task, then I highlight the appropriate box, or pull a new task across from the tasks list.

At the end of the day I count up the hours spent for each task, and adjust the figure in the quantity box for that task (little box above the free text box). The software automatically totals the time for all the tasks selected on each day by each person and displays it in the box top left.

This is just one example of using Time Manager to great effect. The Business Software is fully configurable to satisfy your work flow processes and it integrates with both Access Dimensions and Access Payroll. If you think Time Manager could do something for you why not explore further by calling one of our Consultants on 0333 666 3330 or email customerservice@atlasbiz.com.

Anything You Would Like To Know About Your Business?

Congratulations to Craig, Joe, Liam and Jenny having just completed their annual accreditation courses on sales, and technical to secure our continued Partnership status with QlikView, the Business Intelligence specialists.  We are finding that Business Intelligence is a hot topic for many businesses across lots of industries at the moment as they try to unlock their data to make accurate, timely and informed decisions.

Many reporting tools force you to produce multiple reports and drill-down on data in a highly regimented fashion.

QlikView allows you to get straight to the point by working in a very similar way to the human mind does even allowing you to ask the last question first if that’s what you want.

Whilst at the intensive courses QlikTech took the opportunity to inform us all about their new features and enhancements that they will be delivering in version 10.  Version 10 is due for release at 10.10am on the 10/10/10.

The key enhancements include:-

Performance:- With its in-memory methodology V9 was already impressively quick; during a bench test it displayed results for 2.5 million rows in 95 seconds.  In v10 this waiting time is slashed to just 13 seconds.  Without getting too techie, QlikView achieves this using parallel loads, this means it utilises all available processing cores unlike most of the competitors who would typically only utilise a single processor.  This business intelligence tool really lets you see the full value of the money you invested in your big powerful servers, and when you think that Intel use QlikView to beta test their processors, that kind of says it all!!

Efficiency:-  If your dashboard contains several dials, graphs and charts it will load the results partially, with the fastest report being displayed first.  This means that the users can start to analyse data immediately rather than waiting for the full set of results.

Security:- Previously permissions were defined on a per report basis; the administrators can now apply these across a range of reports rather than one at a time.

Bulk cosmetic changes:- If you change your branding or wish to change your template to align with your corporate image as per the security settings mentioned above you can now do this on bulk rather than one at a time.

Reporting Analytics:- Management can review which users run which reports, when they run them and where they choose to drill down.  Reviewing this information helps you to decide what your Management team are interested in and where it is worth investing your time to get future reports developed so that decisions makers are in the best possible position to make the right choices.

Searching:- Qlikview has Google style search capabilities.  This is easier to show than describe but it is extremely powerful.  If for example you were searching your sales history and you have the capability to simple search by sales rep, before doing so, you can insert some criteria into the free text search box, such as North 2010, the clever software would recognise that you are only interested in transactions that have happened during 2010 where the customers are based in the North and on this selection would reduce the number of sales reps available in the search criteria to only those names that match your search.

If you would like to know more about Business Intelligence or QlikView V10, please email customerservice@atlasbiz.com or telephone our customer services team on 0333 666 3330.  We would be more than happy to email you some informative PDF brochures or alternatively we can organise a “Seeing Is Believing” meeting.

Virtual Desktops, Holidays, Blue Oceans and Citrix

With summer well and truly drawing to a close and Autumn winds of change heading our way, Company Secretary Daphne Butler takes a moment to reflect on the chance for holidays and the Blue Oceans being aimed for in the business arena.



You could be forgiven for thinking that virtual desktops, holidays, blue oceans and Citrix have little in common, but, as so often, there is more to it than initially meets the eye.

In this rapacious, unpredictable recession year, I’ve only managed to squeeze a bare couple of weeks away, and even that was time-sliced with business meetings on the outbound and return journeys.

Blissfully rested, we waved goodbye to a small town in northern France on a sunny Monday morning; a contrast that could not have been more poignant when Dover greeted us with sullen seas, grey skies and persistent rain. We were headed, flanked by bumper-to-bumper mostly articulated lorries, for an overnight stop in Beaconsfield and the Citrix Partner event the following day in nearby Chalfont St Giles.

The Citrix HQ building is enviable, set in Chalfont Park and shielded from the persistent traffic noise of the busy south-east by banks of trees and a golf course. Inside it is as serene and well-managed as a discrete five-star hotel. After coffee we were ushered into a small cinema-style lecture theatre and then followed a couple of fascinating hours (plus by way of a bonus a masterclass in how to present a client event).

In a nutshell, Citrix have made a Business Software step-change, and alongside XenApp, their server hosted applications software, have released XenDesktop which serves the entire desktop to each client machine, in fact it can serve different desktops depending on the requirements of the client user. Clever n’est-ce pas?

To achieve this Citrix identified the following business drivers:

• The tough economic climate is driving cost reduction
• Security is imperative to protect intellectual property and data on the move
• Increasing trend to a distributed workforce accessing company systems using a wide range of static and mobile devices
• The traditional desktop model is insecure, inflexible and hard to manage
• Increasing migration to Windows 7 operating system and 64 bit ushering in new application versions

Installation of Citrix Xendesktop addresses all of these drivers, and AtlasBusiness are eager to help you achieve successful adoption. The success indicators for hosted virtual desktop worldwide are huge with the market predicted to surpass $65 billion in 2013.

What might you ask has all this to do with blue oceans – since we have only mentioned grey ones up till now?

Blue Ocean Strategy is to be found in a book of the same name by Professors Chan Kim and Renee Maugorgne. It has been translated into more than 40 languages; is taught as the major strategy at leading business schools; has sold more than 2 million copies.

The book proposes a business strategy for success based on the following logic:

• Industry condition can be shaped
• Create a quantum leap in buyer value to dominate the market
• Go for the mass of buyers and willingly let some existing customers go. Think in terms of embracing key customer value commonalities
• Think free from a company’s existing assets and capabilities. Ask, what if we start anew?
• Think in terms of buyers’ solution even if that transcends the industry. Seek to solve buyers’ major bottlenecks/chief compromises in using the products/services of the industry.

Maybe someone somewhere at Citrix took it to heart!

For more information about Business IT Solutions visit http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/; http://www.citrix.com/; http://www.atlasbiz.com/

Telephone 0333 666 330

Or Email customerservice@atlasbiz.com

Not just any Financial Statement

We appreciate in most circumstances a Business Financial Statement is nothing to get excited about.... in fact I’ve heard comments along the lines of “I would rather read the Yellow Pages”. But we believe a bit like the Carlsberg adverts “Carlsberg don’t write Management Reports but if they did it would probably be the best Financial Report in the World” or the Marks and Spencer advert “not just any Financial Report, Marks and Spencer Financial Report” we believe our Chairman’s annual statement makes our report somewhat of an exception to the rule.

We’re pleased to announce that the next thrilling chapter of the Atlas Financial Statements has been submitted to the powers that be at Companies House. Over the years we have received a lot of feedback from people who have enjoyed reading the frank and witty writing style of our Group Managing Director in his Chairman’s report. We have Directors from companies whose projects were completed many years ago who still continue to keep a close eye and eagerly await John Butler’s next release. Who can forget John’s scathing attacks on the HMRC over their approach to R&D.

His Atlas Business Group of Companies plc report for year ended 31 December 2009 doesn’t disappoint. Just one of the paragraphs in his introduction includes comments about the Watford Gap, Quantitative Squeezing, Isambard Brunel and guillotines! I might be wrong but I suspect this could be a World’s first where these topics have all been referenced in the same paragraph in any document never mind a Financial Statement. If you didn’t already know John you would be forgiven in wondering what all of this has to do with a Systems Integration company, but John delivers this and brings it all together in his own unique way. I don’t want to spoil your reading but other highlights to wet your appetite include references to the Andrew Marr show, the England versus Slovenia World Cup match and the 2012 London Olympics!

In brief the report has a happy ending highlighting a 50% revenue increase for the 12 months January to December 2009 versus the same period in 2008, as well as a slight 5% improvement in our gross margin. John does however warn that there are numerous external circumstances that could affect all UK businesses and how we perform over the next 12 months, not least Mr Osborne’s budget and the risk of a double dip recession.

What are you waiting for?? Take a look at the report now!!  http://www.atlasbiz.com/docs/A027Dated2009consaccounts.pdf

Atlas Director Celebrates Special Birthday!

We just thought we'd share a few pictures with you today: from company secretary, Daphne Butler's birthday celebrations no less! Daphne was presented with several items of bird-related paraphernalia to adorn the garden of her and John's new house in Hay-On-Wye, which no doubt they'll enjoy upon their return from holidaying on the continent. Everyone at Atlas would like to pass on their best wishes to Daphne for her birthday and the people who run the blog would particularly like to point out that nowhere in this article does it reveal her exact age... we take it the cheque is in the post?!

15 Years Service For Atlas Sales Manager

This month we celebrate Joe’s 15th anniversary of working at Atlas. Joe joined Atlas back in August 1995 straight from school when he was just 16 years old. We recruited Joe as a junior administrator performing day to day clerical tasks such as answering the telephone, reception duties, sending sales statements etc. As part of his remuneration package Joe successfully completed a two year BTEC National course in Business Studies at South Cheshire College and we were delighted with his Diploma result.

Joe displayed a keen interest in computers and was very customer focused and as such after just a short period of time we promoted him to the help desk team. Joe picked up the product portfolio very quickly not only showing a good understanding of how the products worked but also the forensic approach on how to investigate problems when customers experienced issues. Joe proved very popular with our customers many of whom passed on lots of complimentary feedback. On a couple of occasions the sales team recruited Joe’s assistance for demonstration preparation, one thing led to another and before we knew it Joe was joining them for customer account manager meetings, and then prospect demonstrations.

When asked, Joe said that he quickly caught the bug for the sales life when some of the prospects gave him tours around their offices and factories to explain who they were, what they do and the nature of their requirements. This helped him to piece together how the clients use the Atlas solutions on a day to day basis and the important role the applications play in helping management make informed decisions. Joe has now been part of the sales team for approximately 8 years and currently wears the Application Sales Manager’s hat. “I really enjoy getting out and about and meeting representatives at organisations from a wide spectrum of industries. No two days are the same. The thrill of the chase and the tight deadlines keep me on my toes, and as the software industry is so innovative there is always something new to learn”.

Atlas have an excellent reputation as a local employer, with a majority of the team having worked at the company for over ten years. We would like to publicly thank Joe for his long and loyal service, and again congratulate him on the birth of his first child Sofia. John Butler, Group Managing Director said “Joe has been with us man and boy, over the years we have seen him achieve many goals and he has picked up many high achiever awards along the way. He represents an excellent role model to others.”