Buka Puasa Bersama

“Buka puasa bersama” was held by PG to promote and strengthen friendships and foster family values amongst Muslim staff through breaking fast and tarawih prayer.
The entire PG staff was present along with all the management team and this is an event that was highly anticipated by all Staff.

We were fortunate to share the spirit of Ramadhan with all the orphans from the Nusantara Foundations who was invited for the event. This was a truly memorable occasion and one that we all hope would continue year after year. You can view the photos below. Enjoy!

Staff Promotion September 2008

It is with great pleasure that we announce the promotion of our colleagues below.

These people are tremendous assets to our company and will continue to work on their respective department/division while being an integral part of the development of Precision Group.

Congratulations to all of you and keep up the good work.

Precision Group Office Holiday Notification

Our Jakarta Office will be closed for “Idul Fitri Holidays” on Wednesday and Thursday 1st and 2nd of October. We will resume operation on Friday 3rd October 2008.

For urgent enquiries during this period please contact our Hong Kong office at
(852) 2827 1199.

We appreciate your understanding and apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.

Kind Regards,

Client Services

The What If

“What?! No way!”

That’s the first word that came out from my wife when I told him that I want to use bike to the office.
“The traffic is unfriendly, what if you get hit by motorbike or even worse, a car”.
“Well, I just have to be careful then”.
“What if you hurt your back?”
“I’ll take it easy, I’m not going to race other bikes”.
“What if you had a flat tire or broken chain or perhaps someone decide to grab your bike while you riding it and hit you flat to the ground?”
“……??”

You see, the thing about ‘what if’ is that it has an astonishingly limitless posibilities of growing. Doesn’t really need to be logically true. Just start with a bit precaution, add some creative mind and stir it well with lot of negative thinking, and voila! there you have it.

Somehow, human minds are naturally thinks toward negativity. So natural that it need a lot of effort and famous quote to move it to the other direction. We need motivation seminars, talk shows, books, CDs, anything to just think positive. They make a huge business out of it. There’s this Chicken Soup book that was a hit that they decided to create Chicken Soup for Lost Soul, Chicken Soup for Teenage Soul, Chicken Soup for Married Soul, and so many other chicken flavored books. Can’t imagine what did the chickens do to become so inspirational species.

So what’s wrong with our mind anyway?

There is this theory saying that we actually posses an inheritance intelligence. Meaning that our cells contains the memory of our forefather. And since our fore fore forefather is Adam (and Eve) which been bring down to earth for some negative reason of stealing the forbidden fruit, then our cells are most likely bear the same guilt and negative traits.

Wow isn’t that heavy? I wont push it that far if I were you. Just want to share the understanding that this ‘what if’ things wont do us any good. Fears, worries, were just some kind of built in mechanism in our body that was pre-programed base on bad memories. So instead of letting this negative programmer control our live, why don’t we unleash the high spirited, optimistic, fear nothing, believe everything attitude that actually reside underneath.

After all, what we can do is prepare, not prevent. Anything that we can do right now for the future is to just prepare when it do happens, not prevent it from happening.

Just like master Oogway from Kungfu Panda said, “Yesterday is History while tomorrow is Mistery, but today is a gift. That’s why we called Present”. So heads up guys, stands proud, live today like it was the first day you ever had. Cheers!

Philippines answers the call to prosperity

Canadian companies see opportunity in country’s rise in offshore services

Sarah Efron, Financial Post Published: Friday, September 05, 2008

Filipino agents work at Advance Contact Solutions Inc.’s call centre in Manila.

MANILA — In a row of cubicles, young women with headsets are talking with customers across the ocean in North America, answering their questions about products they’ve purchased at a U.S. department store. It’s midday and the call centre is mostly empty, but by 2 a.m., the newly renovated room will be packed. And by October, two more floors will be transformed into call centres.

No, this isn’t Bangalore. This shiny call centre, operated by global outsourcing company SITEL, is located in the Philippines, now the No. 2 country in the world for offshore services. Following India’s model, the Philippines has realized that offshoring — bringing part of a company’s operations to a foreign country — could be the key to dragging the country out of poverty.

Total offshore and outsourcing revenues in the Philippines grew to US$5-billion in 2007 from US$1.5-billion in 2004. The sector now directly employs 340,000 people and contributes more than 3% of the country’s GDP. And the industry trade organization is trying to keep the boom going: Business Processing Association of the Philippines (BPAP) has an ambitious goal of increasing the country’s share of the global market from to 10% from 5%, and aims to hit revenues of US$13-billion by the end of 2010. The Philippines is just one of many countries, such as China, Hungary, Poland, Brazil and Mexico, that is trying to tap into the rapidly-growing offshore market.

This SITEL office in Manila is just one of six call centres the company has in the country. The company established 200 call centre seats in the Philippines in the year 2000, and now has 7,500 seats manned by 9,000 employees. SITEL, which is controlled by Onex Corp., Gerry Schwartz’s Toronto-based private equity firm, operates call centres in more than 20 countries. Like an increasing number of outsourcing companies, they’re looking to spread their business operations across various countries in order to mitigate risk factors in any particular region.

“There’s a trend away from putting all the eggs in the India basket,” says Paul Schmidt, partner and managing director at TPI, a global outsourcing advisory firm based in Texas. “For our clients, it’s not India or some other location. It’s India and some other location. They’re looking to have a number of global locations, kind of a diversified portfolio, if you will.”

The Philippines’ widespread use of English and its historical ties with the West — it was a U.S. colony for almost 50 years — is helping in the global outsourcing market. “In call-centre work, the Philippines is a strong No. 2 and is very competitive with India,” says Mr. Schmidt. “The quality of their voice services is considered very high because of their English proficiency and cultural affinity, particularly for North America, which they have leveraged into supporting the back-end processes as well.”

Like India, the Philippines is also buoyed by a strong telecommunications infrastructure, tax breaks and low wages: Total labour costs for an employee are around US$5,000 to $6,000 a year, compared with US$25,000 to $30,000 in North America. The Philippines also has one distinct advantage over India: the local accent is seen as more palatable by some Western customers.

“We decided to start our operations in the Philippines rather than India, because the dialect here is softer,” says John Langford, executive vice-president of ICT Group, a Pennsylvania-based global outsourcing company. He is sitting in the boardroom of the company’s call centre in Manila’s Makati City. “A lot of our clients in the U.S., and also the U.K. and Australia, find the Indian accent very harsh. The Filipino accent is more neutral. A lot of the time, our agents are mistaken for Hispanic.”

Out of ICT’s 5,000 call centre seats in the Philippines, 200 serve Canadian clients. Most are contracted by Canadian financial institutions to respond to incoming service calls or to make outgoing sales calls. Other Canadian companies with offshore operations in the Philippines include Telus Corp., which has 6,500 employees servicing their own clients and clients of other companies, and Thompson Reuters Corp., which has more than 1,000 employees doing back-office work.

However, there are some red flags for Western companies considering setting up shop in the Philippines. The country is seen as politically unstable, and some foreign companies fear a sudden regime change could alter the business climate. The quality of education is also seen as a limiting factor for the industry’s labour pool. “At the moment, we are churning about 800,000 new people into the workforce every year, yet very few of them can qualify for an outsourcing job,” says Winston Padojinog, senior economist at Manila’s University of Asia and the Pacific. “The acceptance rate for workers in the industry is only about 5%. There’s a mismatch of skills, and some of those skills are very basic: English skills and analytical skills.”

While achieving 10% of the world’s offshore market in the next two years may be a difficult target for the Philippines to reach, the sector is certainly on track for substantial growth. The Philippines’ offshore industry is already making moves to expand beyond Manila to other regional centres to keep labour costs down, and call centre managers are working with educational leaders to align graduates’ skills with industry needs.

And taking another page from Bangalore’s playbook, BPAP is encouraging the industry to move beyond call centres, which currently make up about two-thirds of the country’s operations, and move into higher-value outsourcing such as legal services, back-office accounting, architecture and video game design.

Meanwhile, the impacts of the offshore industry are having ripples through the Philippines’ economy. Near the call centres, 24-hour shops and restaurants have popped up to cater to the young, well-paid workers. Plus, the industry is having a side effect of retaining some workers in the country, which is well known for sending its people abroad to be homecare workers, nannies, nurses and seafarers.

“One of my goals is to give Filipinos job opportunities here in our own country,” says Danilo Reyes, president of SITEL’s operations in the Philippines. “Because of the offshoring industry, a lot of would-be migrants have stayed behind because they have a stable, good paying job here that they can be proud of.”

Financial Post

sefron@financialpostbusiness.com

This week on TED: Nothing is impossible

This week on TED.com Peter Diamandis lays out several great reasons to keep exploring space — and shares his inspiring ideas for getting us there. As he says: Nothing is impossible. Scientist Paul Rothemund talks in detail about his specialty, DNA folding — a technique of almost unimaginable promise that could let us create … anything. And check out Jonathan Drori’s funny, but a little bit scary, look at how much we don’t know about science, that we think we do. (See how many of his four questions you get right.)

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do

Starting with four basic questions (that you may be surprised to find you can’t answer), Jonathan Drori looks at the gaps in our knowledge — and specifically, what we don’t about science that we might think we do. Watch this talk >>

Peter Hirshberg: The Web and TV, a sibling rivalry

In this absorbing look at emerging media and tech history, new-media legend Peter Hirshberg (speaking at the 2007 EG conference) shares some crucial lessons from Silicon Valley and explains why the web is so much more than “better TV.”
Watch this talk >>

Peter Diamandis: Taking the next giant leap in space

Peter Diamandis says it’s our moral imperative to keep exploring space — and he talks about how, with the X Prize and other incentives, we’re going to do just that.

Watch this talk >>

Paul Rothemund: The astonishing promise of DNA folding

In 2007, Paul Rothemund gave TED a short summary of his specialty, DNA folding. Now he lays out in clear, abundant detail the immense promise of this field — to create tiny machines (and maybe even genes) that assemble themselves.
Watch this talk >>

A good Brief : an Exercise for creative people

Just got back from Mas Ferry Dad’s funeral in Bogor at 15:37, I rushed to my “tempat kost” (that’s what the guys called my working space) to check some emails and skype messages. My last conversation with Cynthia this morning was about the SLA stuffs, I thought this is a big effort from PG of how to make things better with FP. Anyway, I need to digest some important points on the SLA, and see if I could contribute more on these. And suddendly the day was even more painful, when Cynthia was asking me to submit anything for our Blog ☺. Whew this could be hard, yay! Lemme think about it.

Got up at midnight (00:10), and I was dreaming about SLA thingy, ouch!, hmmm, there will be some consequences if we want to deliver a better service for both internal and external clients. One thing that I could think about is how to prepare my team with a better way to dig a brief from our clients. Yes should be a good one, but how could we have it though?

A good brief is half success with an identity project. If you have all the information and an in depth understanding of your client’s brand you will have the basis for a great logo and striking identity. Without it you’re just shooting in the dark and can only rely on your luck to find the right solution. A good brief also simplifies your work by giving numerous seeds of ideas to work with.

Sometimes clients are not very talkative and without a clear structure the briefing session will take less than five minutes and all you get from client is that you have to be ready with at least 10 different options for the new logo by next Tuesday and that he wants something “WOW”! Obviously this is not much useful information and will be virtually impossible to do any good work.

I try summarise one of a good example how to have a good brief from one of the articles I found a year ago on www.commarts.com. Of course, not all questions will be relevant for every project. Also this questionnaire doesn’t include any practical questions regarding the working relationship with the client. It’s all about the brand and what it should stand for.

The Questions will include:
1. General questions
2. In depth interview
3. The Market
4. The Target
5. Current Identity

General questions

1. What is your business?

Example: We make shoes
Why ask: Understand what a company does officially, later on in the questionnaire it will be interesting to see what the real product/service is.

2. How old is your company?

Example: More than 10 years old
Why ask: It’s for general orientation. The answer may also give you an idea.

3. Size of your company?

Example: 150 employees in 3 countries
Why ask: The answer may give you an idea and gives a general understanding for the weight of the brand.

4. Your business in one sentence?

Example: We make great hiking shoes for families and professional hikers
Why ask: We are getting closer to the nature of the business, but we’re not done.

5. Your business in two words?

Example: Hiking shoes
Why ask: That’s more like it.

6. Your business in one word?

Example: Hiking
Why ask: See how different the real nature of the business from the official one in question 1.

7. Your business in one letter?

(joke)

In depth interview

8. How did you start the company?

Example: My granddad was a scout in WW2 in the Austrian alps and he had to go up hill 5 kilometers every day. He perfected the army shoes for 3 years and after the war he founded our company.
Why ask: Such stories will give you amazing insight to the company and may give you an idea.

9. Is there a story that is unique to your company?

Example: Actually Edmund Hillary wore a shoe my granddad made in 1953 when conquering the Mount Everest
Why ask: It tells you what the company is proud of, therefore you can build on this in your logo.

10. If you company/brand was a person who would it be?

Example: Columbus, because he was an adventurer always looking for new ways of doing the same thing.
Why ask: A brand is perceived by consumers like a person. You trust them, you communicate with them through advertising and purchase, you get disappointed by them, etc. The identity you’re designing is the face of that person.

11. If your company/brand was an object what would it be?

Example: I don’t know, maybe a compass
Why ask: Ideas, ideas, ideas, you can’t have enough of them. You can get it from the client directly or his answer may trigger one in your head.

12. If your company/brand was an animal which one would it be?

Example: Camel
Why ask: This is a conversation starter. If he says elephant, you may ask why to find out more that might give you an idea. You get the idea.

13. Is there an important object, building or person for your business?

Example: Our original factory in Zurich is painted bright pink and people always joke about it
Why ask: You are looking for existing imagery that the brand is already known for, you may just need to make an icon out of it.

14. What do your wear to work?

Example: Jeans and t-shirt
Why ask: The answer sets the style for the identity.

15. Do you have plans for tonight?

(joke)

The Market

16. How does the market see your company today?

Example: They think we’re a well established company with good products
Why ask: Must know what the current perception is to make sure the new identity doesn’t depart too much from it, so that the brands keeps the trust of existing customers.

17. What aspect of your image needs improvement?

Example: People think we are old school
Why ask: This is the bad perception, that keeps the business from growing. This is what you have to fight with the new identity.

18. How do you want your image to be seen in 2 years?

Example: We want to be seen as a company with traditional values but using the latest technology and materials
Why ask: This is what you have to portray in your new identity to serve your client.

19. Who are your competitors?

Example: CAT, Timberland and other smaller companies
Why ask: The identity has to be easily identifiable and it has to be unique. It’s essential to research the competition.

20. How are they better/worse than your product/service?

Example: CAT and Timberland has strong brands. We are less well known. CAT is masculine, we are not, but want to be. Timberland has a very natural feel to it. We want to have that too. We have a bigger history and we are more serious about our product than these two brands
Why ask: You have to identify your clients brand’s strength and weaknesses and build on them.

The Target

21. Who is your customer?

Example: Mainly hobby hikers and a few professionals as well
Why ask: You need to know who are you talking to. If you’re talking to kids you need to speak a different visual language than if you’re talking to bankers.

22. If your customer was a cartoon character who would it be?

Example: Ha ha, I would say Nemo
Why ask: Cartoon characters have exaggerated characteristics. Identifying the stereotype of your consumer is easier through this exercise.

Current Identity

23. Do you have an identity?

Example: Yes
Why ask: You have to create a visual continuity, unless a sudden change is required because of a strong negative association with the old identity.

25. What do you like about it and what do you not like about it?

Example: I like the colors, but the boy scout around the fire is not serious or trendy
Why ask: Obviously you may consider to keep what client likes and stay away from what he doesn’t like, unless you have strong reasoning for doing otherwise.

End…
I hope by reading this good example, we must have a very clear understanding of what the company/brand is all about. The Creative team must have several ideas already for different directions. But before you would even open a new document in Illustrator, we may want to consider going through this exercise again and again.

That is all for now, need to prepare “makan sahur” shortly (2:45), be back again sometime next week or when I got a different dreams, hope is about “why we need the workflow or marketing communication”, I am not sure. Good bye for now

Bajoy

Buka Puasa Bersama

We would like to invite you to “buka puasa bersama” on Monday the 15th of September 2008. Please kindly RSVP with Rina by Friday 5th of September 2008.

We will also be inviting the orphanage from the Nusantara Foundation and we would really appreciate it if you could join us in this special occasion.

Let’s make this occasion a memorable one for all of us and let’s all feast together. Bon Appetite.

Kind regards,

Jeremy Kemp
Managing Director

The old days

I was just checking out this new blog and noticed the “Old Days” page so clicked on it to see what it was all about. I was so presently surprised when I saw those pictures of our early years. It is so nice to see all the faces that have been part of our growth. In particular the ones that are still with us continuing to contribute.

This sort of thing is a great measure of how far we have come and progress we have made over the past few years.

If any of you have any pics of the past it would be great to share them with us all so we can look back at where we have come from. Also if you are in touch with any of our friends who have moved onto other things it would be great to get them to update us on what they are doing now and to share some of their experiences with us.

WNS enters the BPO big-time

So the long debated and much anticipated saga of the Aviva BOT (Build-Operate-Transfer) has finally been resolved, with WNS Global Services taking on a $1 billion contract to become the British insurance giant’s BPO provider of choice for the next 8 years.  WNS will be assuming all of the current 24/7 Customer contact center work and some of EXL Service’s F&A work, with the latter’s contract remaining until 2012.  This contract follows a storming 2007 for WNS, where the Mumbai-headquartered firm has made significant inroads into both financial services and retail sectors, in addition to its already dominant position in the airline sector.

Some key points

• This deal will likely propel WNS close to a 10% marketshare for F&A BPO
• WNS’s recent acquisition of BizAps gives the firm much-needed ERP enablement skills at a time the firm is making aggressive strides to compete for enterprise BPO deals – a key requirement
• Not a vote of confidence for the much-vaunted BOT model for business processes – and Wall St. also seems to be going cold on BOT. It’s interesting that Aviva is electing to move to a straight BPO model at the same time it is expanding aggressively into the US domestic insurance market
• WNS’s revenue has rocketed to $460m for fiscal 08 – a 32% hike over 2007, ever since our popular guest columnist Deborah Kops took over their marketing.

‘

‘$1 Billion Dollars….

Source: http://fersht.typepad.com/the_outsourcing_bloghorse/2008/07/wns-enter-the-bpo-big-time.html