March Moves

March 2001

The River Tame rises in Denshaw, tumbles through Delph, skirts Dobcross then tracks the Huddersfield Canal that has emerged blinking into Diggle from its three-and-a-half mile trans-Pennine tunnel. These Saddleworth villages with their culture of beer walks, band competitions, morris men and rush carts sometimes feature on "Last of the Summer Wine" or in films like "Brassed Off".

Saddleworth is a tiny part of Yorkshire that overflowed the Pennine range but was tidied into Oldham, Lancashire, in 1972. Like Yorkshire the mills are of stone-grey millstone grit, not Oldham's ruddy brick. Saddleworth's industry is wool while Oldham was the world's largest cotton manufactory with, at one time, over three hundred cotton mills: "one for every day of the year".

The view from Inclusive Technology's window

Inclusive Technology moved to Delph shortly before its managers, Roger Bates, Trish Hornsey and myself, bought the new company we had founded from the games giant Infogrames. On the 1st April 1998 just five of us, three of us teachers, were operating from a single room business unit of 750 square feet. In the year before the "Management Buy-Out", sales of software, access devices and training had amounted to £350,000. This grew and we took on another Unit (the communal kitchen) and then another (an ex-naval detonator store) and then another, and another until we had a rather disconnected 2,500 square feet. Then the ICTS Distance Learning Units arrived: eighteen pallets of them with twelve pallets of binders. It was time to move.

Imagine 5000 sets of these!

Our new unit is still in Delph, still on the Tame, but a quarter of a mile downstream toward Dobcross. It was an old vehicle-breakers' shed - "Dronsfield's Mercedes Parts". Bemused Merc drivers still occasionally circle our yard. The building has been completely renovated and a mezzanine floor added. The most successful meeting room in the old Units - the kitchen - has been lovingly re-created and improved.

Now we have 5,000 square feet, six times as much as when we started. We have a core of fifteen staff, three times as many as before and five of them teachers. But sales of software, hardware and training in the current year will top £3,500,000, exactly ten times our annual sales when we first moved to Delph.

Mezzanine floor with kitchen in background

Carole takes the calls while Tim lurks

Meanwhile we transferred to new servers, a new super-clever phone system, and a new network. Our internal development team, particularly Helen Melhuish and Tim Adshead troubleshot this gigantic task carried out by two sets of outside contractors. The result is one hundred and thirty-four network points and two servers linking printers, phones and computers to the outside world via an optical fibre with a potential bandwidth of 8Mb.

You won't notice. Carole will answer your telephone call and no one will ever ask you to "press seven if you want to …". You may be asked if you would like to leave a voice mail - but Jim Rockford had that. However your voice mail is now a little sound file that can be emailed to the intended recipient if need be. Spooky!

As well as moving and having our busiest month ever we were working on our April 2001 catalogue. This has eight more pages - forty-eight in all and some very exciting new products like the P+G Inclusive 4talk4 and Picture Browser - organise your digital pictures and clip-art (including 1,500 brand new pictures from us) by keyword and topic then click on a button to paste them into your work.

My desk with a sneak preview
of our April 2001 catalogue