Gwendolyn Arnauld Elfglitter

Today we celebrate Singapore’s 41st National Day! To me, it’s a day more than just watching pretty fireworks and glamours. It is a day of hardwork that really draws out the Esprit de Corp amongst our heritage E**l sales personnel (and SOME of the heritage D**z*s folks). The word is “SOME” becuz SOME really helped out like one of us, whereas there were SOME who simply “STROLL” around or better still, suddenly EVAPORATED into thin air!

Recently, big turns of events happened everyday. It all started from the day they switched on the migration of the inhouse system from our heritage system to the D*L’s. With the operations unit’s Head of Department (HOD) citing his infamous phrase, “Don’t worry, everything is in order. We have proper process in place”, we experienced the worst nightmare we could ever imagine. The operations personnel were unable to complete the consignment allocations on time and 1st few days of the system migration launch, we are experiencing many consolidation shipments being bumped off from the airlines. Some of the “popular” reasons being: “Cargo cannot be found (a.k.a. lost in the warehouse)” or “document cannot be found” or “consignment could not be completed on time”. If you asked me, I would say that there are few major causes to such disastrous outcome.

1. The management was too overly ambitious. Imagine, the last day of the training was 31 July. And the date of system launch - 01 August. Firstly, we are humans and not gods. How would we be able to grasp a complex system and be able to execute like experts the next day after the training??? Take the sales team, who have always been referred to as the “more elite one” than the ops team for instance, we already have problems understanding only 1 module of the system, needless to say the ops team who are supposed to know several more modules of the system than us! And the best part I found out later is that, they were not even taught on how to complete the consignment!!! Secondly, the management was too confident to swing over all the heritage E**l’s customers at one go. Just a quick check based on the customer database I maintain, we are talking about easily more that 3,000 customers!!! :S

2. Wrong choice of date for the system migration launch. To start the change on the first day of the month is definitely a “No-Go”, as this is the critical time where most customers are having the heavy shipment traffic - termed as “month end shipments”. Besides, several departments will also be taxing the system to process their “month-end closing or reconciliation”.

3. No backup plans!!! Heritage E**l has back up plans even when it was just a cross over to the next millenium and now you’re talking about 2 giants in the industry merging under 1 computer system/network, and no contingency plans??? And all the “Don’t worry, we have everything in place. We have all things in order” self-denial crap? We don’t need it.

4. No unity. Adversity even at this critical moment. I can still hear people saying “E**l people”, “E**l’s cargo”, “E**l’s shipment”, “Theirs, not ours”. What the heck??? Don’t they get it? There is NO MORE E**L, NO MORE D**Z*S, NO MORE A*I! ONLY D*F! We go through the same routine! Being bought over, to be re-engineered! If I may quote this from someone, WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE!!! The thought of it really rises my blood pressure manz! As*holes!