When the Edmonton team is starting their work day, Mark Whittlesea is getting ready for his first glass of StEmilion at his home in Leicestershire, England. Mark jokes that, “Canadians don’t have nice wines… not like in Europe.” He follows that up with, “But, Canada does have amazing places to go snowboarding. I’ll give you that.” It’s this kind of jovial banter that helps bridge the gap between PPM’s Canadian office and our European representatives.
Mark has served as our Senior Account Manager in Europe since autumn, 2012. He was actually with another software company when he cold called our head office. After learning more about our incident management and reporting system, he was drawn to our organisation and campaigned to help us expand our European efforts.
“For me, Perspective brings intelligence, structure, and repeatable, reliable processes all together in one place delivering unrivalled benefits to security, investigation, or incident management teams. You can keep everything in one place, bring in other systems, and make everything compliant, even if it was a huge mess before.”
When demoing Perspective to potential clients, Mark finds that Perspective’s ad hoc reporting tool, Analysis Expert, is a real winner:
“You can easily create, save, and share reports and charts on the fly for yourself and your colleagues. Instant reporting, from any of the data fields you have available within in your system, is an incredibly powerful tool to have at your disposal for accurate planning and decision making purposes. Mix this in with the rest of the software’s functionality, and you will really start to see the impact that Perspective will bring to your department’s improved effectiveness and results.”
Before he meets with an organisation, Mark tries to do as much fact finding as he can and customises Perspective to their needs so that they get a really good idea of how Perspective will work in their environment.
“I like to show potential clients how Perspective can relate to their corporation and situation and, ultimately, how it will deliver some real step change improvements to their operations’ efficiency and future results.”
Mark frequently meets clients in London and Suffolk. While he’s travelling, he makes sure to take in some live shows like the Boomtown Rats, The Who, and Brian Ferry or to sing some Depeche Mode tracks at karaoke (they’re his favourite band from his teenage years!).
On our European team, Mark is joined by Richard McKoen, Application Specialist. Richard is a PPM veteran with over 14 years of experience with our software and services! Before then, he was in the Merchant Navy as a navigator/deck officer and in the Royal Navy Reserve, first as a navigator and then as an executive officer specialising in minesweeping. He moved on to become a regional manager, running security operations in the County of Sussex, then Kent, and the City of London. Notably, this included running the physical security operation for the contract company appointed during the construction of the Channel Tunnel. With his background, Richard has the practical experience to know how security works, especially for PPM’s airport, transportation, and government clients.
When asked why he chooses to work with PPM, Richard explains:
“I really like the people, attitude, and philosophy of PPM. I get bored with doing the same thing day in and day out and that doesn’t happen when I work with their clients. I once even stayed in New Jersey for 6 months to get a large pharmaceutical client up and running. Through PPM, I’ve had the opportunity to work with clients all over the world including the US, Singapore, Zambia, and Papua New Guinea.”
Since his introduction to PPM back in 2000, Richard has seen our software evolve into a ‘grown up’ system that can do things “no one could even imagine back then”:
“Visual Analysis is one of the visually coolest things PPM has, and Perspective’s new Workflow is just the most practical addition ever. A client I worked with in Chicago configured Workflow to send emails directly to the local fire department and their insurance company when a set of specific circumstances were met using one of their standard operating procedures in Dispatching. Another client, a small software company in Dublin, configured Perspective to track trading losses and gains for brokers and included regulatory implications. If something happened more than twice in two consecutive months, losses would need to be signed off and sent to different departments. Each level has a review layer, and Workflow handled all of their complicated processes. They even changed the ‘vehicles’ tab to ‘risk management’ which includes asset records for reporting. Needless to say, Perspective is great out of the box and even better once it’s configured to your needs.”
When he’s not travelling all over the world, Richard works out of The Technology Centre in Suffolk, England. Like Mark, Richard enjoys wine and has a love of extreme sports. He also has had a real passion for racing cars, 1960’s era sports cars to be more precise. In other words, he prefers racing historic cars with skinny tires and without modern technology or breaking systems and calls himself an adrenaline junkie, yet a safe one who has only been in 1 or 2 very minor accidents. He says he’s had more physical injuries while show jumping horses. We’ll have to trust him on that one.
Between Mark and Richard, PPM’s clients are well looked after throughout the UK and the rest of Europe. If you would like to reach out to either one of them, please drop them a line at Mark.Whittlesea@ppm2000.com or Richard.McKoen@ppm2000.com.
Notice some different spelling in this post? We thought we would treat our UK audience with a post specifically written for them in Queen’s English. Cheers!
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