Top ten FAQs

Is ATC just a glorified dashboard?

No, although it is often the feature that first attracts organisations to ATC.
The engine of ATC systematizes the process itself, building in best practice to ensure consistency. The dashboard sits over the top to give accurate and timely insight. The result is true transparency and a powerful lock in of the performance improvement.

Is ATC a Software as a Service model? Can I have it inside my firewall?

We offer a full SaaS model or you can have it within your firewall. There are Governmental and Military organisation that use the hosted service – but the choice is the clients.

How do you charge for it?

The charging is the same whether the system is hosted (SaaS) or internal to the client - the additional administration overhead offsets the hosting costs.

There is a one-off setup fee and an annual per-user subscription fee.

We offer three levels of service:

1. Off-the-shelf templates from the AppMarket
2. Bespoke templates - we work with the client team to configure best practice templates for their organisation
3. Full Professional Services engagement where we bring specific subject matter expertise, for instance in Risk Management, to help the client define strategy, process and execution.

How long does it take to get started?

ATC is very quick to deploy. A template can be configured in a couple of hours if necessary; however the process normally takes between 3 - 5 elapsed days (agreeing the structure, layout and information to be captured, etc.) to produce the first iteration of templates that you can start to use.

Is it a lot of man effort to handle the inputs?

There is no more effort required than your teams are currently expending in managing the existing process, and often ATC significantly reduces this load.

Where data exists in other systems it can be imported or accessed through ATC to accelerate set up and reduce ongoing effort.

And where this is not possible, the benefit of intuitive ATC templates geared specifically for your processes generally encourage users to embrace the new tool. Once they realize that the system is designed to make their job easier and that their contribution is visible, data input becomes a lot less problematic.

Can it take feeds from other systems?

Yes. Our system is based on Microsoft SQL server, so it is standard, scalable, secure and able to interface with most systems.

How easy is it to enhance or upgrade once it's live - will I have a high ongoing cost of ownership?

The ongoing cost is normally only the annual user licenses.

As there is no coding involved in the configuration of the templates or reports, non-technical users within the client organisation manage the vast majority if not all, of the system administration.

Will I have to invest in a lot of training?

It normally takes 1 - 2 days to train client administrators and ½ day to train users.

Would we still use Microsoft Excel?

Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool and will probably always be a must-have for many activities.

ATC takes over when you need to manage more complex or critical processes that need input from more than 2 or 3 people in a local team. We often replace Excel templates and import the historical data.

Is there a long consulting project around the implementation?

The length of engagement is dependent on the level of consulting input the client requires. We bring all the best practice templates as standard to our engagements.

The range of consulting engagements is quite broad - if we are advising on strategy, processes improvements and how to track and measure performance the engagement would be longer (maybe 3 months) than if we are simply helping build bespoke templates around your current process (maybe 2 weeks).

ATC is about taking your processes and making them more effective and sustainable. It is designed to sustain the value long after the GC Marshall engagement has come to an end.