All our clients know that Diss is continuously busy devising and developing new ways of working for the 21st century. What they may be less aware of is the continuous change that goes on behind the scenes to make sure that the company can deliver those services in a fast moving world.
One of the current issues concerns space and location. Long-serving staff and long-standing clients will remember Diss when everything was located in the Owen Road building – that was, literally, in the last century!
In 1997, the client facing teams moved round the corner to Bounty House to develop the business into something ‘broader’ than simply the production department of Bounty.
By 2005, when the Ark-H Group first entered into discussions with Bounty about acquiring Diss, the business was already turning over in excess of £3m, only about 40% of which was Bounty, but it was still firmly interwoven within the bigger Bounty business, in terms of space as well as function.
When the acquisition of Diss from Bounty took place, the production elements remained in Owen Road and the client, customer and central service departments on the ground floor of Bounty House (with Bounty’s own personnel occupying the first floor.) It was never an ideal situation because of the difficulty of achieving service delivery integration across the two sites. With the Bedford site added into the equation, that integration was even harder. But it worked and everyone was more than happy to leave things alone on the principle of ‘If it’s not broken don’t fix it!’
Now all that is about to change again.
Bounty moved out of Bounty House last year, leaving Diss in possession of a building that was only half occupied. Now, rather earlier than expected, we are going to move out of Bounty House, in order to allow Bounty and the owners of the property to take advantage of a mutually beneficial property transaction.
So we’re all moving back over to Owen Road. This will mean a certain amount of upheaval – not least because it is a tight deadline to be moved by the end of September!
`The next few weeks will be a bit crazy - like moving house in a hurry. As ever, all the staff are rising to the challenge in grand style. They are determined to manage a smooth and seamless transition and the aim is to make sure that we don’t drop a single ball in the process. In fact, there will be many benefits from the team all being under one roof again. Hopefully our clients won’t even notice – except, of course, that when you come to visit, we’ll all be in Owen Road.
As you might expect, the process won’t end here. Even the future of the Owen Road home for the business will need to be reviewed as part of the planning for Diss into the next decade.
But for the moment we have enough on our plate with the move from Bounty House. In terms of the bigger picture and the longer term – as soon as we know we’ll keep you posted. So watch this space!