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Corporate Vision Press Release

October 18th, 2004, Bradford, England - Atlantic Global PLC, today announced the launch of Corporate Vision, a business portfolio management solution designed to help organisations better understand the composition and performance of their portfolio of projects, resources and related costs. Developed in partnership with Norwich Union and Pfizer, Corporate Vision has helped free organisations from the limitations of managing their people, projects and business through reams of out-of-date, time-intensive spreadsheets.

"Corporate performance management has opened people's eyes to the value of real-time information to the business. Yet when it comes to the management and performance of an organisation's most valuable resource - its people - we still rely on reams of manually-created spreadsheets," explained Eugene Blaine, CEO of Atlantic Global. "The spreadsheet is a tool of the 20th, not 21st, Century. In a typical organisation, more than twenty percent of peoples' time is spent developing and populating these spreadsheets when it could be better spent delivering projects and services! For the first time, Corporate Vision brings real-time, enterprise-wide visibility into the utilisation of people and related costs to a web dashboard rather than a spreadsheet."

Corporate Vision blends elements of the traditional disciplines of project portfolio management and corporate performance management to deliver a completely new class of software to the market. It not only offers organisations a highly effective solution for enterprise planning, budgeting and resourcing, but also provides a single source of all data related to these processes. This data is then delivered back to the organisation through a role-based dashboard that provides information based on employees' areas of responsibility, such as resource manager, project manager of chief executive.

The project portfolio management elements of Corporate Vision have been developed to help move project managers away from managing on a task-by-task basis to managing by resource, time and budget against milestones. Rather than presenting a narrow, task-based view of a project, project managers see a wider, role-based view of their responsibilities. This includes a representation of their demand for resources against the enterprise resource pool and skills base capability, a view of actual costs and time spent on a project against plan, and the status of business-focused milestones such as client sign-off or project go-live. From this view, they are able to request resources, alert the organisation to potential project overruns or overspends, and set resources, budgets and milestones for future project demands.

Corporate Vision also takes this day-to-day information about projects, resources and costs and presents a real-time dashboard, with which line-of-business managers and executive management can monitor enterprise performance in real-time, based on KPIs and milestones. With full organisational transparency into resources, costs and progress against project or service deliverables, the business is able to better answer questions about resource alignment with corporate objectives, key milestone performance and financial performance. Executives are able to quickly identify problem areas, and drill down for more details on status, time, budget and resource. While, extensive scenario modelling functionality enables the organisation to take a business plan offline and see how predicted or desired changes will affect resources, cost and the ability to meet deliverables.

Commenting on the limitations of traditional task-based Project Management tools, Mark Raskino of Gartner Group said, "We've been refining the same basic project management tools for 30 years. Yet people still have many project failures. People still somehow manage to report only at the very last minute that a project won't be finished on time. We all need to know how to juggle our portfolios more effectively. We don't need yet another way to capture more detailed task re-estimates."

Corporate Vision greatly enhances the capabilities of existing project management and project portfolio management (PPM) tools by providing information on resource availability, actual costs and milestone completion that supplements the information on task plans and status provided by these systems. With this information, project managers can better monitor and justify the success or failure of their projects. Similarly, the enterprise performance monitoring capabilities of Corporate Vision complement existing corporate performance management (CPM) initiatives, by providing insight into non-process related KPI's such as resource utilisation, project or division milestone completion, and actual costs versus planned. Further, the "what if?" scenario modelling capabilities allow executives to simulate the effect of process change on resources and costs, and better plan for the implementation of change.

Corporate Vision is designed to be deployed using Microsoft Internet Information Server running on Windows 2000 or above, with an Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server DBMS. Integration can be provided for ERP and HR packages, such as Oracle and Peoplesoft, Project Management systems, such as Microsoft Project and Primavera, and BI or CPM packages such as, Cognos and Crystal Decisions. A typical 100-seat implementation can be completed within a week, including populating the database with resource and project information. Corporate Vision is generally available from October 18th 2004.