John Linton
....than it did yesterday.
Apart from very sore ribs the affliction has passed as if was never there so it is a great relief to know that I am not actually going to die at this particular moment in time. I know that male's make a much bigger fuss than females about minor afflictions but that one was pretty nasty - based on my lack of experience with such things.
There is now only on day to complete the work that was planned to take two days as we can't move our flights as the few services out of Colombo in the direction we wish to go are fully booked so that's why God created efficiency. Fortunately most of the work that was meant to be a joint effort yesterday has been done by Rohan and I will do my best to explain the other concepts more quickly than I had originally intended to later this morning before going to the airport and catching our flight late tonight.
Our major objectives in Sri Lanka over the coming year are as I attempted to explain them yesterday - to finish the process of ensuring that every person in Sri Lanka has more and more detailed knowledge of the queries our residential customers will make than at any previous time in Exetel's 'history'....as well as continuing to meet the requirement of an average answer time of less than one minute for any incoming call. This, in itself, is a tough proposition but it will continue to get tougher as 'old' services continue to be replaced by new services requiring a continuing expansion of the knowledge required and it will now be done without one of the two 'on loan' Australian 'knowledge transferers' with the other one due to return to Australia at the end of this calendar year.
So the second key objective is to replace Martin's dedication to the creation of new sections (and ongoing revision of the old sections) of the exewiki with Colombo personnel and to acquire the new knowledge required for new services by sending people from Sri Lanka to Australia rather than the previous methods of sending Australian personnel to Sri Lanka. That in itself will be a major challenge. However it will be interesting to be part of making it work.
Our other key challenge for the Sri Lankan operation over the coming 12 months is to develop additional sources of revenue so that the company is not reliant on Exetel for its continued financial existence. We have a number of ways to do this which include the most obvious one of expanding our contract programming business which we will now begin to do. Our own knowledge of complex data base systems and the process of developing them nd maintaining them over the past six plus years is far greater than the average likely 'target' company we will provide services to and that knowledge plus the much lower hourly cost for coding and supervision should make that objective more than possible....and in itself could easily cover all costs associated with operating the Sri Lankan company.
The other opportunity is to provide back office support services to other companies that match the experience that has been built up in providing similar services to Exetel Australia. We have had several enquiries about doing that but we have not pursued the because, in my opinion, we weren't ready to do that at the times we received the interest. I think that the reservations I had have, almost, completely disappeared now and that we could consider providing such services in the future. Whether we could sensibly offer such services to Australian companies remains a doubt but we could certainly offer them to NZ and UK companies.
So it will be an interesting day.
Copyright © Exetel Pty Ltd 2010
ABN 350 979 865 46