John Linton ....it's past time to improve every aspect of them.
Business 'life' begins to return to 'normal' today with the return to work of more than half of our 'holiday takers' with the others mostly due back next Monday. So another 'Christmas' has passed with, if you live in Sydney, one of the fiercest and most spectacular thunder/lightening storms I can ever remember turning the harbour in to a pyrotechnical display to rival the New Year's fireworks - but much, much louder. I am one of the most indifferent of people but even I turned off various electrical appliances and pulled the power leads from the sockets because the lightening strikes were so very close and so very frequent. Some sort of portent perhaps?
Annette and I will go to Sri Lanka late this afternoon with a more than usually full agenda and, with the growth in personnel in Colombo, a particularly heavy review work load for Annette. Our principal focus will be on the training programs we need to put in place for the balance of this calendar year and the recruitment programs that will support our, quite, ambitious plans. It will be a very exciting few days with by far the most 'Australians' (5) in Colombo simultaneously. It will be a very busy week for many people getting so many new programs under way and beginning the changes to Exetels directions over the coming two years. We have managed to build quite a large, and immensely complex, company in Colombo over the past four years (which seem to have passed in a 'flash') and it's only now that I am beginning to grasp just how much more complex the next year or so are going to be.
Before we depart today there are a larger than usual number of 'house keeping' tasks to be completed this morning as we begin the re-vamp of our overall data base systems to ensure that we re-kindle the drive to more fully automate everything we do as we begin to do more new things than we have ever done in the past with more suppliers and addressing more markets. We trialled the new fax software that we developed in house on Sunday which managed to send almost 38,000 faxes in less than four hours (our total current prospect data base less numbers listed as do not call on the ACMA data base). Being able to send 10,000 faxes an hour is a gigantic improvement over the 100 or so an hour by the previous third party software. It is also around one tenth of the cost (including the the cost of the DND 'wash' that wasn't previously possible to be done automatically).
This is just the first example of how much more effort we have to put in to redeveloping our automation program - it illustrates just how fat, dumb and happy we have become by still using systems and processes we put in place in the very early days of Exetel and have not bothered to improve since then. If we can make the same progress across all our other processes we have just done with our fax out software then we will be in much better shape than we are today. So, among all the other things we need to do to make 2012 more successful than 2011, and its predecessors, the critical analysis of our internal systems and then redeveloping them remains the key to maximising any future success we may enjoy. It's not very exciting but it is easily the most productive set of tasks we can undertake.
It's going to be a very busy week.
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