Cedar Group plc
Cedar Group plc was formed in the early 1980s, providing a payroll and
financial accounting software bureau service to many companies. It
utilised software that it had developed in-house which, following
customer requests, was eventually upgraded and sold as a package. The
company is quoted on the main London stock exchange. Cedar is based in
Cobham, Surrey, has some 300 employees worldwide and has around 400
customers worldwide. In addition to the financial software package
(known as Cedar Financials) we also sell Cedar Trac, an application for
managing project based time recording. Within our Call Centre business
we sell Tele-Connect, a Call Centre scripting and Case Based Reasoning
tool and provide the only Call Centre Quality Assessment service in the
world, the REACH Service from our wholly owned subsidiary, QualTech. We
are the worldwide distributor for a work flow application, known as
BusinessFlow. We also own the Intellectual Property Rights to a data
warehousing company called PMpL.
Cedar has customers in the UK, Ireland, continental Europe, USA, Africa and Australia.
Some 12 months ago we looked at the opportunities presented for our expansion and recognised the emerging market of 'affinity group selling'. This opportunity needed many of the product set that we had in-house, data warehousing to set up the sales campaigns, our Call Centre products to allow easy contact to the customers and our financials and work flow products to manage the delivery and accounting of the sales. In order to make this happen, Cedar has built its Call Centre in Castlebar. The Call Centre, built in a 3 week period, uses our Tele-Connect scripting software managed by BusinessFlow and Cedar Financial to account for the sales. We have currently created some 50 jobs along with our associated company, Ansaback Limited, who manages the day to day operation of the Call Centre. We anticipate that by this time next year we will be occupying new premises in Castlebar which should allow us to grow our Call Centre business to some 250 plus people.
In addition to the Call Centre opportunity in Castlebar, we have been invited by the Industrial Development Agency of Ireland (IDA) to move our software development operation from the UK to Ireland. If we are to make this happen, we will be able to provide some 30 jobs for experienced software application engineers and developers as well as some 20 jobs for young people leaving college or university who want a career within the software industry. At this point of time (end June 1999) we are recruiting for these jobs and our website (cedargroup.co.uk) carries the advertisement that we carried in the Irish Times a couple of weeks ago (the advertisement is also on the Castlebar site). If you have the experience to help us or know any one that does then please ask them to send their CV to lucy.saunders@cedargroup.co.uk.