Rupesh Selvaraj

  

#surivivalinstinct #covid19 #coronavirus #curfewlifted #buygroceriecs #buyingesstinalitems #gentocity #kindness #helpeachother #flight-or-flight

“In March 2000 a fire broke out for less than 10 minutes at the Royal Philips Electronics plant, Mexico, damaging its supply of semiconductor chips. Nokia Corporation and Ericsson LM relied on these chips to produce their cell phones; together they received 40% of the plant's chip production. Both companies were about to release new cell phone designs that required the chips. At Nokia, word of the setback spread quickly up the chain of command. Nokia's team, which had a crisis plan in place, sprang into action. With an aggressive, multipronged strategy, Nokia avoided any cell phone production loss in three days. In contrast, the low-level technician who received the information at Ericsson did not notify his supervisors about the fire until early April and had to scramble to locate new sources for the chips. This search delayed production and proved a fatal blow to Ericsson's independent production of mobile phones.” Harvard Business Publication Education, 7-Aug-2012.

Above case study was read almost 10 years back, including many similar case studies in the past by myself but never had witnessed or experienced such a situation previously during his career both in Sri Lanka or overseas. Today (18-Mar-2020) I went through a similar situation in a company where they rent IT equipment in Colombo, Sri Lanka.

The first Sri Lankan national to contract the coronavirus was identified on 11-Mar-2020. Government of Sri Lanka declared special holidays from 16^th (Mon) -19^th (Thu) of March to control the outbreak of Coronavirus and the very first holiday was announcement came on 14-Mar-2020. Few Sri Lankans understood the seriousness of the situation started thinking of business continuity, safeguarding employees, mitigating the risks etc. Based on the strategies adopted in other parts of the world, many opted for “working from home” as there were many rumours that the holidays might be extended further, as a strategy to curtail the spread of the virus.

By Saturday and Sunday, the handful of companies realised the gravity of the issues since these companies had at least a decent Business Continuity Plans as part of their strategies. They were the first to place orders or initiated to source from the renting companies for Laptops in big numbers for their employees to work from home since most of the employees had desktops in Colombo. Majority of the private companies began to work on 17-Mar-2020 as the rest of the holiday did not apply to the private sector, as usual, senior management immediately sat down to discuss the next plans and by late afternoon they started enquiring on the renting options. They were too late since by that time all laptops in the market had been already reserved. The companies which had strong Business Continuity plans or clear strategic plans had already placed orders for the laptops by Saturday and Sunday via emails promising to raise the official Purchase Order latest by the next working day.

Coming back to the above case study, today I was informed that there are requirements for more than 2000 laptops in the Colombo market but none of the renting companies had stocks to supply the demand even at a higher price. More requests continue to keep coming in for items which never rented before such as dongles in big numbers.

Many companies never thought such a situation will come; they were too much optimistic; was never willing to spend time and money on Business Continuity Plans;  little knowledge due to the common belief that this related finances of the company only; and as usual CFO made sure Business Continuity budgets were shot down etc.

The senior management considerably needs to spend more time and money on the Business Continuity Plans, and make it part of the annual strategic plans. Also, include it as a KPI for departments/directorates, key professionals, promote and support it all areas of the businesses. Maybe after spending time and money the necessity will not come next year, during the next decade to prove the case or to foolproof the system in place but it will be tested during the most unexpected time of your organization or the country, regardless, it needs to work efficiently and effectively in any conditions.

I was a part of the business continuity planning team and my direct line manager was part of the main business continuity committee which was responsible for stratic planning and key decisions made. Also, taking this opportunity to thank all those who taught many new things in this unknown area of Business Continuity world especially the colleague from Briton.

Virtual Tour Agent

Sri Lanka, as a small tropical island in the Indian Ocean, relies heavily on tourism as one of the major drivers of its economy. In this context, it is extremely important that the tourists who visit Sri Lanka carry with them a life long experience having visited places that would be to their heart's content, which in turn would increase the influx of tourists to the country. Therefore providing a travel plan to fulfil the likes and dislikes of each individual person can be seen as a key issue that needs to be addressed. Tourists normally have to rely on common tour packages that are designed and prepared by travel agents or travellers have to prepare their own tour itinerary which may or may not fulfil their expectations. In the past, there were attempts to solve these problems using database and web technologies but they were not as successful as expected.

The Authors propose that Software Agents technology could be utilized to search, filter and present the necessary information to prepare the travel itinerary. With the necessary data in hand, the Authors will first use an Expert System (ES) to generate the travel itinerary and then the Nearest Neighbour Algorithm (NNA) to find the optimal pathway of scheduled locations. This will provide the users of the prototype Virtual Tour Agent (VTA), a travel plan which would best suit their requirements as it is made according to the traveller’s preferences and requirements. Also, there is an added advantage of being able to modify and customise the travel plans depending on the requirements being at any certain location and being able to continue with an altered travel itinerary to get the maximum results. This enables the traveller in planning his future trips as it would be highlighted to the traveller. The proposed solution also provides other travel support information like weather, transportation and currency information etc. The travellers are provided with the facility of making hotel reservation through web services in real-time and also getting a confirmation Email from the remote (hotel) site through the email engine developed as VTA tries to reduce human involvement. The VTA is implemented on a module basis to have scalable, robust and efficient nature of development. The VTA is developed using J2EE architecture and the Web Component is presented with the Struts Framework. The business logic is implemented using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) and the database layer is implemented using open-source MySQL. Java Expert System Shell (JESS) has been used to develop the ES of VTA and Java is used for other major developments. In the evaluation, the authors were able to identify solutions to the core problem which is the travel itinerary preparation and other travel problems are met and properly developed to give a proper and accurate answer to the users of the system. The VTA also provides support function (i.e. reservation facilities) for travel planning which makes VTA fully-fledged system overall. The success rate (85%) of the evaluation emphasis on how the prototype is developed in accordance with the real world (tourism industry) and also insists on how the features of the VTA are really accomplished to provide preferences based and customizable travel itinerary.