Adept Scientific Blog

We wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  As my daughter would say, it’s only a few more sleeps until we all stop working for a few days over Christmas.  We’ve put together a web page to list when our offices are open, but even if we’re not ‘physically’ in the office, we still try to pick up our emails just incase you do need any help over the winter break. And remember, our website never sleeps!

Adept Scientific UK office on a snowy evening

As you can see from this photo taken yesterday evening,  we have just had our first fall of snow in the south of England.  Our teams in Denmark, Germany and the USA are all used to snow at this time of year and they have no problem getting to work.  Every year when it snows in the UK, it seems to take our local authorities and highways agencies by surprise.  A good few inches of snow fell over Hertfordshire last night and now the roads are at a standstill.  Here at Adept Scientific in Letchworth, we try not to let a little bit of snow get in the way of supporting our customers.  Those team members who live close enough managed to walk to the office, some came by train and one person even cycled. And, thanks to the wonders of modern technology, all our other colleagues were able to work from home.  We are all here to help you get the best out of the products and systems we supply and support.  As I wrote in a previous post we’ve now been doing this for 25 years and all the members of our team are dedicated to delivering the best possible customer service, whatever the time of year.  Of course, we have changed a bit over the years as you will see if you click through to our little slideshow which features a few photos we’ve dug out from our UK  picture archives.  As I hope you can see, we enjoy what we do and we look forward to working with you in 2010 and beyond.

Have a Happy Christmas and a great New Year

Paul Bragg

With a team of people spread over several countries we don’t all get together very often. Over the last weekend though we had a great excuse, as we gathered at a party to celebrate our 25 years in business. The photograph was taken early in the evening before things got too messy, as they have a tendency to when our team gets to party.

Adept Scientific 25th Anniversary Party November 2009

When we founded Adept Scientific back in 1984 we had the simple aim of helping scientists and engineers benefit from using personal computers. Back then the IBM PC was the number one personal computer and the Apple Macintosh had just been introduced. There were very few dedicated applications for scientists and engineers and most people did not have a PC on their desk. How things have changed: our daily work usually revolves round our use of personal computers whether they are desktops, laptops or netbooks. There are now many really good software and hardware packages to help us do things we would perhaps not have thought possible 25 years ago and we supply and support the best of them.

Over the last 25 years Adept Scientific has grown from a tiny two person company to one with four international offices serving customers all over the world. We never imagined that the business we started on our kitchen table many years ago would have grown to this. So a big thank you to our customers, to our suppliers and to the team here at Adept Scientific for helping us to make it happen.

Paul Bragg

Chris Rand of Business Marketing Online recently visited Adept Scientific’s UK office to interview Paul Bragg one of the founders of Adept Scientific. The discussion centred on how important good customer service is to the team at Adept Scientific. You can watch the video or read the inteview transcript below.

CR : How does Adept Scientific keep its customers so happy?

PB : We’ve always focused on being a specialist supplier of software and hardware for technical computing applications so that could be anything – from data acquisition to mathematics – but the key thing is, we always approach things from a consulting perspective to sell our products.

We get paid by selling products, but we have to teach people and transfer the knowledge about how the products work before customers buy because they might want to do something we can’t help them with. We’d rather they didn’t buy something that was wrong, and be certain that ours is the right solution for them, than buy the wrong product and end up dissatisfied as a result.

So, customer service, customer satisfaction – we want happy customers- that’s really important to us. Most of the people who work here have previously worked in engineering or science and they know what it’s like to be on the other end of buying things. It’s very important you make the right choice and so we want to make sure people always make the right choice.

CR : Does Adept Scientific have a typical customer?

PB : No, because we have such a huge range of customers, from large corporations who are buying all sorts of things, to individuals. We even have retired professors who buy software (mathematics software for example) because they enjoy the subject and want to play. We have a lot of student customers. It really varies a lot so there isn’t one typical customer.

In data acquisition obviously, it tends to be an organisation, a company that’s got a particular project and we’ll go along and talk about what they want to do, how many channels etc, and we’ll produce or suggest a solution for them and they might chose to use us. If they were looking for bibliographic reference management software then we sell them EndNote or Reference Manager, depending on how they want to handle their data.

CR : Adept Scientific’s support is legendary. Does this cost money?

PB : Typically no. Pre-sales we do a lot of support for people. We’d rather – it’s selfish in some ways on our part – but we’d rather do that support beforehand because, really, it costs us less money. If you’ve got the wrong solution and we’re struggling to fix it then nobody’s happy. We’re not happy because we’re going to have to spend a lot of time trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and you’re not going to be happy because we sold you the wrong thing.

So we’d much rather have people talk to us first so that we provide them with the right solution and, yes, it does cost us money. But in this marketplace, it’s all part of supplying people. We think it is anyway – it’s probably the reason why we’re so successful and we’ve been here 25 years. A lot of companies have gone by the wayside. With us it’s not sell and forget, it’s not that sort of business – we’re looking for a long-term relationships with our customers.

CR : So why does the company invest so much in keeping customers happy?

PB : You’d think that would be the way that everybody would work, because long-term, if the customer’s not happy, they’re not going to buy from us again. We have been around for 25 years and we have some customers who maybe haven’t been with us that long but keep buying from us. I think that’s because of the sort of service we provide, and not always by the same person because we have different people doing different things in the company. Some people might be specialists in mathematics, some are specialists in software for quality control, chemistry – whatever it might be. We’re often doing a knowledge transfer, sharing knowledge actually, because the customers will know an awful lot about their particular area of expertise. We know an awful lot about the products that we sell and we have to marry that knowledge together so that we can make sure that what you want is going to work.

Work is a serious business of course but we also try to have fun here at Adept Scientific.  Sometimes we have an excuse to dress up and do silly things.  Halloween is a perfect time for this.  Here is a little video we created to show the strange people who were seen seen roaming our offices today.  We had prizes for the best carved pumpkin and for the best costume. During the day we were also busy doing all our usual work and launching our new training video for EndNote and updating our web pages for new MapleSim 3.0 and making sure we shipped all our orders as October is the end of our financial year.  Busy but having fun too!

Quality in Practice October 2009 Event

Packed with presentations, case studies and a workshop too, there was something for everyone who attended our highly successful Quality in Practice event on 8th October. The positive, enthusiastic atmosphere, as delegates compared stories and shared experiences, made a refreshing change from all the industry doom and gloom of late.

Attendees heard how four different companies had adopted Northwest Analytical’s SPC software solutions to address a range of quality-related issues. Industry expert and Chief Technical Officer for Northwest Analytical, Louis Halvorsen, gave two instructional presentations about overcoming barriers to implementing a comprehensive Quality Information system and the use of multivariate SPC techniques to provide on-going process monitoring. He also amazed delegates with a workshop that showed how to implement an SPC data collection and reporting system in less than 30 minutes using database utilities from Northwest Analytical – no programming required!

All in all, a very worthwhile day, and a great chance for users and non-users alike to put our SPC software into practical perspective.

If you missed this event, but you’d like to find out more about any of the topics covered during the day, please contact our UK office on +44(0)1462 480055 or email quality@adeptscience.co.uk. In the meantime, you can read more about our range of Statistical Process Control solutions on our website.

On 1st October, The Times Higher Education released its list of the top 200 universities around the World. It’s reassuring to see that we’re still high up on the league table, with UK universities commanding four out of the top 10 slots and 18 in the top 100.

We have another interesting snippet of information for you too. Did you know that ALL the UK and Irish Universities ranked on this list among the World’s Top 100 institutions own an EndNote site licence? It’s no surprise that all the best providers of higher education have chosen market-leading EndNote as their preferred reference management package.

Check out the Top 200 list of universities for yourself

We’ve done it! The 25th Anniversary Autumn 2009 edition of our Technical Computing Magazine is finally finished and at the printers. And now we’re celebrating in style, not with champagne, but with large slices of hot chocolate fudge cake all round! There’s a chorus of satisfied sighs from the marketing department – chocolate and achievement is a great source of endorphins! Our customers will have already received email notification that TCM issue 38 is online, but you can visit our TCM homepage to read all the articles online or download the entire magazine here.

Phew! This month we’ve had new software releases coming out of our ears! First we had the launch of Cambridgesoft’s high-powered suite of laboratory desktop tools for chemists and biologists: ChemBioOffice 2010. Just a few days later, we received news that PCB design software Easy-PC 13 was available. What’s more, this value-packed upgrade contained no less that 45 new features and enhancements! Researchers working on a Mac finally got their hands on the latest version of renowned reference manager EndNote X3, while Maple users found improved tools to share and publish technical documents with the release of MapleNet 13.

So while August might still be traditionally regarded as the ‘holiday month’ by many people (our customers all seem to be away when we’ve tried calling), it’s been an extremely busy and productive month for our software developers. I know we’ve barely had time to draw breath!

Seeing and reading all the material that has come out this week about the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Lunar Landing got me thinking.   Watching the live TV images of the moon landing in the middle of the night in the UK was one of the key life experiences that encouraged me to get involved in science (yes I am that old).

It seemed to me at the time that the lunar landing was the pinnacle of scientific achievement but when you look back at the technology they had then and what we have now it’s amazing what was achieved.

At the time we watched the images using a low resolution black and white TV that probably still used valves can you imagine what the same thing would look like in HD now?  The various computers used on Apollo 11 had a fraction of the power and capability of any of the desktop, laptop, smartphones we use daily.  Back then nobody had a thought of having a  personal computer or even a personal calculator for that matter.   Although the development of the internet had just been put in motion as a DARPA research project I bet few people had an idea of how it has come to transform our lives.

It’s only when I take the time to look back at the massive developments in science and technology that I have witnessed that, for a moment, I stop taking them for granted.  I can’t wait to see what  is coming our way in the next few months let alone the next 40 years.

Paul Bragg

This week saw the launch of EndNote X3 for Windows, a shiny-new version of our most widely used, renowned reference managing tool.

EndNote has one of the biggest user-bases of all of the technical software tools we supply. That’s because it’s essential equipment for anyone who spends a large amount of time researching what other people have written about particular topics – a common task for many of our customers. Not only can EndNote help them find the information they need online, it can store and manage extracts quickly and easily, then make creating bibliographies and citations effortless.

Thorough beta-testing and customer suggestions have helped to mould the new version, which offers highly-requested features such as Cite While You Write support for OpenOffice.org Writer 3 and Apple Pages ‘09, new Group options and composite chemistry styles, side-by-side duplicate comparison, new compressed library options, EndNote Web/ResearcherID connectivity and the ability to create chapter bibliographies. You can find a more detailed list of the new features on our web pages or take version X3 for Windows for a free testdrive.