Back from Sarawak

Events for the day

Well, the whole family woke up quite tired because we got back from our Sarawak trip around 8pm yesterday. We were on the road for 12 hours from Bintulu to Miri to Senai to Singapore. Phew, it was such a long journey.

Anyway, for the first day of work after my holidays, it was back to my company's largest project in 2004/2005 .... the Panasonic global logistics system. We started this project in Dec 2003. Basically, in Apr 2005 Panasonic will begin to ship all their international orders outside Japan using our product, EVA 6.0. Hosted out of Singapore, EVA will begin to accept EDI orders from Japan and push these out to all Panasonic factories outside Japan. It then manages the entire export cycle to move goods from these factories to their customers worldwide. In terms of accomplishment, I think this project tops it all for us here in Singapore. Imagine, last year the revenue of Panasonic world-wide was US$62b, by this time next year half of this will be transacted through our system. Man, its mind boggling for us.

I had to go to the Panasonic office in Tuas, Singapore, because they wanted someone to stand-in for Kutra, our lead technical manager for this project. Kutra had to go back to India because his wife and daughter perished in the tsunami crisis that happened on Christmas day. That was real tragic.

Spent most of the day catching up with Anil, our Comex project manager, and Hilary, the Panasonic project manager, on the latest project activities. Also glad that we now had a daily checkpoint for all the engineers in the Tuas office, chaired by Anil. With this we now know exactly what is happening for the day and what would be upcoming in the next few days as far as engineering activities are concerned.

As usual, our meetings at Pansonic ended at around 9pm everyday. But for today intead of going straight home, we rushed down to Matsuo, a Japanese Restaurant frequented by Ban Leong our boss, for a company dinner; Grace, Beh, Anil, Bernard, myself and Ban Leong had a real yummy dinner. It was supposed to be a night-out for the team because it has been quite a while since we have all caught up together. Also met up with Marcus Pang after dinner. Marcus is our sales partner based in China. He was back from Shanghai for a few days to spend time with his family here in Singapore before flying back again.

About People

Veera, our technical manager for the finance module of the Panasonic project, was on MC today, apparently he was not feeling ok with what had happened to Kutra's family. Veera and Kutra had been very close. The sad thing was, Kutra spent the most part of his life in the last 10 years working so hard that he seldom had much time for his family. Now, the Tsunami took away his wife and daughter leaving behind his son. He feels that life has washed away the good times and that there was a great sense of loss.

Apart from this, a number of other people in the company were also out of action because of medical reasons, funny that it all happened at the same time. Mike, our CEO, had his retina problem and was also on MC. Susan Sng, our HR executive, was also on MC because of a foot corn operation. Steve, our sales manager, was also on MC because he had to go for his medical check-up. He was urinating blood again, a problem that arose because of his kidney. Naveen, our Java engineer, was also on MC, not sure what was the problem here.

Besides them, Ligaya (our technical manager for the Shipment/WebTop modules), Boopathi (another senior Java engineer) and Ben (our harware infrastructure project manager) were all on leave. Hence, not many people were around actually.

Bee Kim, head of software group IBM keeps bugging me about closing the deal for the WebSphere and Rational for a large customer of ours. This customer was called Grocery Logistics of Singapore, the logistics arm for NTUS FairPrice, the largest convenience store and supermarket chain in Singapore. Told her that we needed to include training in her S$72K offer price.

IBM's distributor for hardware and software, Azure Technologies, needed to give Comex 90 days payment terms, and so Wendy, their sales maanger, went to Bee Khim to get more margins. This is quite typical in an IBM distributor relationship. When customers press the distributor for better discounts and/or payment terms, the distributor will press IBM for more discounts. But guess what, IBM says that its either the free training for 2 for GLS, or the 90 days terms! Comex can only pick one. What a tough decision here for us.

Closing Remarks

The time is now 2.30am. Started this blog as my dairy from today onwards. I figured that my entire life can be recorded on the net for a long time to come. Maybe my children and their descendants can read this and delve into what I did each day.

Well, that's it for today.