John Linton I read the monthly report on Extel's Sri Lankan company earlier this morning. It is a very 'dry' report being essentially a series of tables distilling all elements of the operation to a series of analyses of personnel and company performance against a series of benchmarks. What it does show is what progress, or the lack of it, that is being made across they key elements of operating a business. It is by no means the best method of distilling the operations of 50 people over a 4 week period but its 'starkness' does allow someone 10,000 kms away to get a feeling for what is happening. I will go to Colombo next Saturday to do the periodic company review and I always find that process more useful having the statistics provided monthly.
It is now a few weeks short of five years that we hired our first two engineers in Sri Lanka in January 2006 and then sent an Australian supervisor to Colombo in February 2006 to train them in their homes to do basic ticket responses. Since that first 'toe in the water' experiment a great deal has happened. First we hired another two work from home engineers in February 2008 and we visited Colombo for the first time to do that spending a week meeting with the relevant government departments, lawyers, solicitors, real estate agents, fit out specialists, and all the other sorts of suppliers that a start up business needs to deal with (averaging 9 face to face meetings a day) previously arranged by the Australian High commission personnel (who did a superb job for us).
We went back to Sri Lanka again in May and July of 2008 to complete all of the dozens of governmental, legal, accounting and operational processes required to set up a complex business in another country with very, very different conditions than exist in Australia and finally 'opened our doors' in early July 2008 with an Australian general manager and three employees.We also appointed a Sri Lankan as General Manager of the operation in February 2009 but continued to send a series of Australians to Colombo to transfer knowledge and to do specific training until December 2010. There are no 'permanent' Australians in our Colombo offices but we will continue to send people on short term (3 - 4 weeks) assignments throughout 2011. There are now more 'Exetel change over the coming months employees in Sri Lanka than there are in Australia and all of Exetel's back end processes are now done in Sri Lanka. While that ratio may
Over the past two and a half years we expanded the initial floor space twice before moving 16 floors higher and, effectively, taking a complete floor in this quite large complex which you can get some idea of here:
http://www.exetel.com.lk/facilities.php
There are now more Exetel employees in Sri Lanka than in Australia with all back end functions now handled in Colombo and an increasing number of 'front end' sales functions beginning to be undertaken from Colombo. As we add more corporate sales and support people in North Sydney over the balance of 2011 this ratio may change but it is now an operational fact that Exetel can only 'exist' because of the cost savings and additional flexibility that having a Sri Lankan company brings to the Australian business.
During my upcoming review in Colombo we will not be 'dwelling' on whatever achievements we have made over the last, almost, five years but will be concentrating on the immediate issues with which we are confronted and in ensuring that our planning for the current calendar year is as solid as we can make it. Our emphasis will be on adding outbound sales functionality for Exetel and, perhaps, back end provisioning and support for our growing number of 'visps' and even some of the smaller Australian ISPs that have approached us about providing such services to them.
On a completely different topic what sort of wankerish company would claim that a general service upgrade by NBN (Tas) is somehow anything that they have had anything to do with putting in place:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/243257,internode-customers-get-nbn-uplink-win.aspx
These upgrades had exactly zero to do with Internode - they were a service upgrade provided by NBN (Tas) and were simultaneously available to all resellers of that service - including Exetel.
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