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Friday, November 27, 2009

FRIENDLY CHAT WITH THE BOSS

2009 focus at work was to provide strategies to take advantage of the market. The target was to deliver savings amounting to USD 7.5m. With a capex of USD 150m to spend, that translated to a price reduction of 5% which was quite a challenge considering I have to deliver the same across the board - Pakistan included! The fancy term used for the cost savings in Shell's world is VI which stands for Value Improvement!
The incentive for the Consultant was a fee of 10% for every dollar spent if we hit the USD 7.5m mark. It was not just about strategies, operationalising the plan, it was a race against time since, by year end, if we hit below the mark, even by a penny, we will get nothing.
We achieved the magic number in the month of November.
That was just a prelude to what was to follow:
Barry, our Client's rep needed to provide a short article of our key achievement for 2009. His e-mail to Sheldon, our Programme Director, read:
"If you have ready articles I can just copy - that will be great. Clear issues I will include are (1) cost reduction (2) VI achievement (3) time reduction (4) HSSE (5) Innovations? More?"
Sheldon in turn forwarded to us Barry's e-mail:
What do you think? Are we able to help out? I think I have all the HSSE material. I have the latest VI as well. Not sure if there are further cost reduction information.
Since he had the latest VI update,
Lini: I haven’t really done anything else apart from VI this year! So, nothing from me.

Sheldon: Slack ass! Playing golf all year have we?
Lini
:
Yeah...tough to juggle VI in between my golf and tennis. Imagine how much more VI we can get if I had done it on a full time basis!


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