Gladstone north of the border

Gladstone's office in Glasgow is the hub of all our operations in Scotland and Ireland. The office even spreads its influence south of the border as the region reaches as far south as Middlesbrough in the east and Kendal in the west. A quick Google and some basic maths indicate that relative to the total size of the United Kingdom and Ireland, the Glasgow office covers 57% of the entire geographical area. That sounds rather a lot, but an even simpler equation shows that between us we have 81 years of Gladstone experience in a team of just eleven.

The Scotland and Ireland team was brought together almost a year ago. As with the other Gladstone regional teams further south, we provide all the sales, account management and service requirements locally. To you as a customer, this means that you are dealing with staff who are familiar to you and that we can be more efficient in co-ordinating our diaries to the benefit of our customer base.

Many of you will have been in contact with Claire Carroll. As our project manager, she has the challenging task of keeping all eleven of us in the right place at the right time - a role which I'm sure you will agree she does very well. Claire joined the company back in 2001, and seven years of diligently looking after clients has given her the enviable talent of being able to recall client postcodes or addresses from memory.

Over in Ireland, Susan McEntegart (formerly of Dublin City University) recently joined the team as sales executive. Completing the Irish team are Diane Sutton, Elaine Whyte and Tom McDermott. A recent review of our operations in Ireland has brought about a fresh approach. Whilst it is still early days and feedback would be most welcome, we are confident that all our Irish customers are beginning to feel the benefit of having a team that has been present at the ILAM conference, followed shortly after by a series of workshop events. We will again be at ILAM this year and are even sponsoring the pre-dinner drinks. We have a series of user groups planned for September and October.

If you are interested in attending please contact Susan McEntegart +353 (0)87 947 3477. Dates and locations are as follows:

o Friday 19th September - University of Limerick (UL)
o Wednesday 22nd October - Queens University Belfast (QUB)

The new addition to the UK-based team is Zoey Johnson. Zoey joined us in September 2007 and is looking after sales to universities, schools and private clubs in our region. Based near Middlesbrough, she is the only member of the UK-based team that is not resident in our Glasgow office. Keeping the home fires burning (when not on site!) are Stuart MacIntyre (engineer), Claire Carroll (project manager), Joanne Barton and Shona MacKay (trainers), Dawn-Anne McAneny (data services) and Georgia Dowdeswell (Regional Commercial Manager).

Behind the scenes, the Scottish and Irish team has been busy getting to grips with the technical, configuration and general knowledge of all our exciting new products. We already have a number of clients up and running with Connect2, our latest web interface. We also have several appointments in the diary to install our new reporting system, SQL Reporting Services. And we look forward to deploying our first self-service kiosks and CommIdea integrated card payments. We were only just pipped to the post by our southern colleagues in the race to be the first to deliver these products.

Finally, as the author of this article and as the regional manager, I would like to invite suggestions on how we as a team can improve our service to you. You can contact me directly on gdowdeswell@gladstonemrm.com.

29 August 2008