CADS 2020 year in review

Clare Montgomery
CADSLife Video by Clare Montgomery Head of Operations 14/12/2020

2020 was quite a year for all of us, we had lots of excitement and many challenges along the way. Here is our review!

Scroll

2020 was a year we will never forget!

It started with new colleagues & international travel

Our year started with seven new colleagues joining the company and our first visit as exhibitors to EuroShop in Germany.

We appointed our first Mental Health First Aiders in February and had a great #timetotalk walk on a sunny spring lunchtime. Little did we know what was on the horizon!

We successfully completed 2020 English Housing Survey programme with 6,200 physical surveys and joined in the 20 year celebrations for the Scottish Household survey – run by our team in Edinburgh and our regional managers across the country.

Julia Thompson celebrated a fantastic 15 years working at CADS as a retail planner.

And then COVID-19 struck

And then COVID-19 struck, the offices closed – but all staff quickly moved to working from home and thanks to our fab IT team – the transition was seamless!

And while some staff were furloughed the business continued and before long our surveyors were back out on site a – working safely both in the UK and in France – St Tropez no less!

The retail teams were busy – we updated 150 cafe seating layouts for Morrisons with a swift turnaround.

And renewed our ISO 27001 accreditation, together with releasing StoreSpace® 1.10 making it even easier for retailers to plan profitable store layouts.

We also rolled out StoreSpace® for Shell to a number of countries and delivered virtual international training as a first! The work on StoreSpace® continued adding international hosting on Azure to ensure we are Brexit-ready.

Related reading

Post-covid retail recovery – how will bricks and mortar bounce back?

Notwithstanding the challenges, retailers are finding ways of creating in-store experiences that will encourage customers into stores.

Read insight

And the second half of 2020 was very busy!

And completed a complex laser survey and 3D Revit model of the old Daimler HQ – a Grade II Listed Art Deco building.

Then another first – successfully completing the virtual financial audit, before recruitment began again with a new surveyor Jack and a new developer Dom joining the team, as well as promotion for James Halford to Workstream Leader.

Then the offices reopened – for those who preferred to work on-site – while Guy, Aaron, Nigel, Jono and Clare cycled over 1500 miles for #cycleseptember raising over £1200 for Cancer Research, swiftly followed by a great virtual company quiz and coffee morning in aid of McMillan.

We also welcomed back Lisa from Maternity leave and Poppy rejoined the Retail Team and Darren our Infrastructure Support Engineer celebrated 25 years with the company!

We also celebrated all staff returning from Furlough, completing the 3rd year of StoreViews for Asda’s Refresh Programme and a record-breaking month for our Retail Planning team helping our clients continue business in extraordinary times.

Then our last two recruits of 2020 joined the team – support Engineer Liam & customer success specialist Richard, as well as promoting to StoreSpace Support Engineer for James Liffen and 5 year anniversary for lead web development engineer Jemma.

Finally we released StoreSpace 1.11 and added new clients in Netherlands, Sweden and Central America. Before saying thank you all our staff and clients for their support and humour in a challenging year!

How can we help you?

Discover our comprensive range of retail and surveying services