Customer relationships and on-time product delivery are worth their weight in gold in the highly competitive high tech industry. This holds true for Vancouver, BC-based Atimi Software Inc., a 78-person company that delivers software and information technology solutions to the global marketplace. Atimi is a one-stop, full service firm specializing in cross-platform software development, with superior experience in both Macintosh and Windows development, .NET, driver development, application porting and format converters. Atimi’s national and global customers include fortune 500 companies as well as agile smaller companies such as xm|Edit Inc. and PumpOne LLC.

Atimi’s mission is to help its customers hit their system launch dates without fail. In 2006, Atimi was named one of the 6th fastest growing software companies in British Columbia. On a major growth curve since 2003 and with no plateau in sight, Atimi went looking for a productivity tool that could be used across the organization to bolster quality and efficiency in the areas of customer contact and internal task management. One year ago, after evaluating several other options, Atimi, a primarily Mac-based shop, took some word-of-mouth advice and adopted Daylite Productivity Suite, created by Toronto-based Marketcircle Inc.

“Before adopting Daylite, Atimi had no central repository for managing customer contacts or delegating and tracking sales tasks,” says Scott Michaels, Vice President of Client Services. “Our employees were using a real mish-mash of different products. To keep up with the growth of the company we had to find a better, more cohesive way to standardize aspects of our business.”

Michaels is the main point of contact for Atimi’s customers at the business level, and spends more than half of his day on relationship management. For him, the most powerful feature is Daylite’s tight integration with Apple’s Mail and the built-in integrated search capability. “I manage all email correspondence through the integration of Apple’s Mail in Daylite. I used to spend a lot of time cutting and pasting from one tool into another. Daylite’s powerful multi-linking capabilities allow me to add new contacts, create tasks with reminders and automatically link and store the contents of one or more emails to contacts, projects and opportunities.”

When Michaels wants to see a customer snapshot in Daylite, he looks for, ”a good, steady stream of communication.” He says, “Over the course of a project, weekly status reports and ongoing communication captured in Daylite work as indicators, showing me which clients need contacting and which ones have been taken care of. ”

How has Daylite affected his productivity? “The process is foolproof - I don’t have to think about it. On a heavy contact day, Daylite saves me at least one valuable hour. It also helps prevent me from double contacting someone. This adds a level of professionalism which, in the end, contributes to the ROI.” Also, there are six other people working “over-time” with Daylite and Michaels estimates that each saves one of those valuable daily hours thanks to this software – that’s a lot of “man hours” and money saved across a year’s work time.

With contact management as part of a centralized system, customer information can be shared or kept confidential. As Michaels states, “In Daylite, contacts are grouped by project and only accessible to those who need to see them.”

Though Daylite is powerful enough to handle workgroups of 1 to 50, Atimi Software’s teams usually work in groups of 4 to 10. Those managing teams can create tasks or projects in Daylite and delegate them to team members. The person being delegated a task or project gets automatic notification of the assignment. When that individual makes changes or updates to the project or task, the person who delegated the task is notified immediately. This feature gives everyone reassurance that tasks won’t slip through the cracks.

At any point in the process, Michaels and other managers can access the general history of their customers to check on the most recent communication or to find out if product was delivered on time, or even earlier than expected. As Michaels describes, “A little peace of mind goes a long way when it comes to measuring productivity.”

“The reasons why we adopted Daylite have been fulfilled – we have a company wide tool everyone is happy with, the contact and task management process is flexible and efficient, and we save time while gaining stability,” states Michaels. And if that isn’t enough, Michaels adds, “We have confidence in Marketcircle when we need to call on them for support. The people are always upfront and professional, providing us with quick answers. All round they’re a great team of people to work with.”