Stephen Parkinson, Company Secretary, Clariant UK:

"Sandoz, which was our former name, began life in England in 1911, and in Switzerland in the 1880's. Clariant was the name given to the chemicals business when it was demerged in 1995. The company itself grew again in 1997 through a merger with the speciality chemicals businesses of Hoechst.

I am pleased - I've had one or two bruising encounters with consultancies at times. Sometimes consultancies can be over bureaucratic, inflexible, fairly costly, and working to a formula. I think we've found that one of the benefits of using Act is that they have been prepared to be flexible, and although obviously they've got a lot of experience, and some templates that are useful to them, the solution that's been worked on is, I think, a solution for Clariant, not a solution that is easiest for the consultants to reach."

Tracey Fleming, Personnel Manager:

"We've been very pleased with the work that Act have done. We undertook a staff survey late last year and we felt that because of the size and scale of the work involved we needed to bring in an organisation that were experts in this field. It didn't take them long before they got to grips with how we work. I think they came in with quite a good understanding of what the issues were anyway. What they were very quick to do was to examine and identify why these issues existed and provide us with the data to do something about it."