Northern region update

It has now been a year since Gladstone established its Northern Regional team which encompasses the North of England, the Midlands and North Wales, enabling the company to improve on relationships with this important customer base. We cover every local authority, trust, university, college and private sector business from Yorkshire and Lancashire down to Northamptonshire and Suffolk in England to Ceredigion in Wales!

As you can imagine, we had an incredibly exciting first few months travelling the length and breadth of the region meeting existing clients and prospective new ones, with the aim of building a strong working relationship between Gladstone and its clients.

One of the first challenges to be addressed was communication amongst our clients. Gladstone is fortunate to have an extensive customer base with nearly 50% of all local authorities and trusts in the region using Gladstone Plus2 to manage their operations. It soon became clear there was a huge interest in creating regional user groups to get these customers talking to each other.

Due to the size of the region it was impractical to arrange just one user group, so two events were arranged hosted by two generous clients. The first client-led user forums were hosted by Nottingham City Council for the "M1" group and by Liverpool City Council for the "M6" group. In total 35 local authorities and trust clients enjoyed the chance to swap ideas, share best practice and generally talk with each other.

Another client has now volunteered to host a third group which will be aimed at customers based towards the southern end of the region and Midlands area. Details coming soon! It is planned that once the user groups are firmly established we will arrange for representatives from all three groups to come to every meeting, thus establishing a truly unified Northern group.

We have been fortunate to add a number of new clients to the region recently. Bridgnorth District Council and Denbighshire County Council have implemented Gladstone Plus2 to manage their operations, and we welcome them to the club.

Turning to the private sector we would like to welcome Momentum Health and Fitness, Leigh Harriers Athletics, Chesterton SC, Bassingbourn Sports Centre, Carlton Park Hotel and Southport YMCA. We can also welcome Childwall Sports College which are a dual use facility as well as being a specialist sports college. We are confident that many more new customers will follow shortly - watch this space!

We see an exciting year ahead now that Gladstone Plus2 version 9.3 is with us. A dozen clients in the region have already upgraded or are in the process of upgrading to version 9.3 which opens up the opportunities of Connect2 which utilises the power of the web to enable online bookings whereas Kiosk2 is a self service ticket collection system which reduces front of house pressure. Plus2 9.3 also includes integrated chip-and-pin, (with the ability to register online and purchase subscriptions including direct debits), and SSRS reporting (our industry-leading "reports generator" utilising the latest Microsoft technologies found in SQL2005). For more information on any of these innovative features feel free to contact us.

As reported in the recent June 2008 newsletter, for our Welsh clients we are now pleased to offer bilingual options for both the Connect2 and Kiosk2 products. Os ydych eisiau mwy o wybodaeth am Connect2 yn ddwyieithog yna mae croeso i chi godi'r ffôn. (If you would like to find out more about bilingual Connect2 please feel free to give us a call). Gladstone would like to offer huge thanks for all the assistance with the translations, especially David Wood and Angharad Fflur Jones from Gwynedd County Council and Dafydd Lewis at Conwy County Council, without whose help we would not have been able to get this developed so quickly.

Over the past year we have worked hard to develop greater relationships with our existing clients, thank you to those clients and we also look forward to meeting new ones!

Best regards

Scott Saffrey
North Region Commercial Manager
Gladstone Health & Leisure

30 July 2008