January 2005 zoomed by!

Events

Wow ! Time really flies ! The month of January has just zoomed by and I didn't even get a chance to update my blogs since the beginning of the month.

Most of my time this month was spent at Panasonic (see my blog entry entitled "Back From Sarawak" for a brief description of the Panasonic project), especially dealing with the second user acceptance test (UAT2) that started on 10 Jan and lasted till 20 Jan. Most of that time I was at the Panasonic Tuas office managing the engineering team, mainly clearing bugs (we had a long long list here), integration (the project required us to integrate our product with a huge number of external parties e.g. factories, customers, carriers, etc.) and EVA Connect (this was our product that provided the interface adaptors to connect to external parties through EDI, IBM MQ, FTP and so on).

Around 5 days of my time was also spent on supporting the sales of one of our partners, Elipva. Elipva is basically an internet software services company. It did projects like internet self-help software, HR systems and so on. Currently they are engaging one of their latest customers, Chubb Insurance. Now this was really out of Elipva's league because Chubb wanted a data warehouse for their regional office, hence I was dragged in to support them. Quite an interesting project, it had to do with AS/400 systems and building and Operational Data Store (ODS).

A couple of days was spent on another potential customer, Midas. Midas is owned by a branch of a very famous Malaysian business family, the Robert Kuok family. Midas is basically a large supermarket chain catering mainly to the lower-income family from the region of Johor in Southern Malaysia. Most of today's sales session was related more to the Mall Management and rental aspects of the project. We presented a software from Wincor Nixdoft that could help them manage their mall tenants. The people who attended the demo were Christine (the GM for Midas), Baylor (her husband and son of the owner) and Victoria (another relative of theirs!) from Prestico (their property management arm).

About People

Kutra is back and about already. It was good to have him back. At the same time, it is good to keep him busy so that he will keep his mind off his grief.

Today was the day we prepared to give salary increments to everyone. Some were deserving and therefore got more than 15% salary increments, whilst a number of others would not be getting increments for this year because they were either undeserving or were contract staff. Things were really made hard for small companies like us when the Singapore government announced that civil servants will get about 3 months bonus this year! How can the small enterprises match that!?

Concluding Remarks

Mainly a month of hard work and difficult project datelines.