John Linton I was reminded that we processed slightly over 2,000,000 faxes for our business and residential customers in May. This is a good achievement for Exetel as we put this service in place, largely for ourselves, some three years ago and now a surprising percentage of our residential customers use it each month. It was drawn to my attention because the Colombo based program development team did some clever things to increase both the redundancy of the service and to significantly speed up the sending times of any large volume of faxes (our largest business customer sends over 1,000,000 faxes per month). The ability for a residential customer/small business customer to be able to send and receive faxes using their computer/internet rather than having a separate/split telephone line and a fax machine is a great convenience to those people who need a fax service.
We made some progress towards completing the FY2012 business plan but far less than I had hoped for. With only 12 days left before the start of the new financial year the projected work load to complete this essential activity is becoming uncomfortably tight. Perhaps I say and feel this way every year but it doesn't alter the fact that finishing up one year while spending a lot of time planning for the next year is very, very demanding. No matter how 'early' I begin this process it always ends up with a huge number of hours being put in in the last two weeks of June. Perhaps we will make faster progress next week?
We did finalise the 'strategies' for promoting the Optus plans by COB on Friday. The current 'phase' is now in place with a "three months free period for new customers and current customers transferring from Telstra and AAPT infrastructure plans on a new twelve month contract. We reduced the service activation fee for new customers to $20.00 from $40.00 and to zero for current customers. It has taken a much longer time than usually is required to present a new initiative. This is partly due to the level of complexity in how carriers convolute their own wholesale offerings and their, apparent, inability to actually provide straight forward pricing or even provisioning - let alone billing which is an increasingly complex nightmare. Trying to actually work out what a carrier's latest offer means financially (let alone any other considerations) in the short, medium and long terms is becoming almost too difficult. Bearing in mind that they are 'negotiating' different 'deals' with each of their wholesale customers it is no wonder that their billing systems are such a total mess.
We completed the minor re-organisation of the Sri Lankan company following our decision to not continue the consulting contract of the Sri Lankan General Manager but to promote one of the full time Sri Lankan employees to act in that position. This necessitated some 're-shuffle' of several other positions but no real operational changes. The only unusual aspect of these decisions is that Exetel in Sri Lanka now has a General Manager of an 80 person technology company who is a female in her mid 20s. That would be, as far as I'm aware, very unusual in Australia but unheard of in Sri Lanka.....but exceptional people deserve exceptional opportunities.....and so seldom get them.
I am looking forward to completing the business planning next week and then considering how to inject more excitement in to my, and other people's lives.
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39 - Other than the country code for Italy or, with "steps", a favourite novel from my childhood