Art of Preparing Presentations – Understand what your audience like to know

When we are preparing for reports or presentation materials for specific group of readers, we need to know what the report is for, the reader’s job role to determine the level of detailed information for this group of users to understand and respond to the questions/clarifications we need from them through the whole process.

When we communicate either through verbal (e.g. phones, meeting) or non-verbal (e.g. emails, presentation materials, reports) there are 4 types of message that are present in every message/sentence we send:

• What we mean to say
• What we actually say
• What the other person hears
• What I think they hear

Hence whenever we communicate, we must always strive for clarity.  The message you intend to send is the one that should be received.

My Rules of Thumb for Presentation Slides

1. Not more than 6 words in a sentence.
2. Be specific and concise.
3. Do not put in too many information on one slide.  Breakdown into points and add another slide to continue.

Air Freight – Origin Processes

The following topic covers the current RFP (Request for Proposal) that I was working to cover the transportation of Products by 3PL (third-party logistic provider) from China’s ODMs to our Business Partner’s designated locations, through specific lanes defined by the carriers.

This is what happen at the Origin before the 3PL is to perform export custom clearance at Origin.

1. Booking:  3PL will provide the one (1) day ahead shipping plan with ODM and process the booking to 3PL at  a specific time (local time) on the same day of pick up.
2. Loading: 3PL agrees with the ODM on packing the pallets according to our business partner’s  packaging requirements per platform. 3PL will inspect and reject any cargo which does not meet the packing standards.
3. Pick Up: 3PL pick ups the Products at the designated site designated and  provide a trailer with available capacity at our Business Partner’s specified facility for the pickup of Product.
4. Export Custom Clearance: 3PL uses the ODM’s export documentation for the export customs clearance at origin. Business partner provides resale invoice for customs clearance at destination.  Upon receipt of Business Partner’s commercial documentation, 3PL, through it’s designated broker obtains customs clearance while the transport aircraft is airborne, and prior to arrival in destination airport.
5. Custom Clearance at Destination Hub: 3PL picks up the shipments in China, and delivers the Custom Cleared cargo to the destination in-country hubs.  3PL uses the commercial invoice for customs clearance and also to ensure the correct Importer of Record (IOR) is declared in custom form basing on the commercial invoice. 3PL files the Bill of Entry, sent to Business Partner for approval, before finalizationas to ensure the Business Partner pays the correct customs duty
6. Delivery: 3PL delivers the Products to designated facilities.

Inter-routing of Feeds within sites in 1 Organisation

Recently we have office shifting from Level 7 to Level 6 and all old connections for the servers/workstations on Level 7 will be upgraded to a bigger network bandwidth.  The same goes for our Xiamen web server which is the transmission channel for receiving and sending electronic data feeds to our Customer’s site in Penang, Malaysia.  This results a new IP address to be issued for this web server.    However we can only hold on to the old IP address till Sunday, June 21 and after this date, the old cable’s connection will be disconnected.  We tried to route the network routes from Xiamen to Penang via Hong Kong but this fails due to the below reason:

• The web server in Hong Kong located in DMZ (which mean outside Organization A network) while Xiamen database server located in Intranet (which mean inside Organization A network). Obviously, the machine outside Organization A network cannot access those machine in Organization network. Otherwise, Organization A network is in danger.

• Probably there are some ways to configure in firewall and allow particular machine to access back from DMZ to Intranet, but it need network guys on the mapping.  We later realized that Xiamen is resided in an Intranet architecture and South Korea is using Intranet machine (Organization A network) to access Customer’s web service gateway n Penang. It will implied that Xiamen might able to move their web service program to Penang without any connectivity issue.

We tried out the alternative with South Korea’s team and as what we guess, we finally get the feeds to route from Xiamen, to Seoul and finally to Penang!  The ACLs over at the Customer’s site remains unchanged (as what we previously provided to them for Xiamen’s public IP addresses).

Next, we have succesfully connect Xiamen directly to Penage with the new network bandwidth and preparing for another weekend’s migration to this new connection.

Database Server Upgrade Implementation

We have a project to upgrade the existing MS SQL Server 2000 to MS SQL Server 2005.  As this project activity is running in parallel with the change requests for August deployment we need to ensure the servers required for the deployment does not impact the tight timelines for the deliverable.

The implementation strategy for August deployment are:

1. Database server upgrade and migration to test environment.  This is to be done before deploying new codes to the test environment for user acceptance testing.
2. System Integration Testing – Data Integrity Testing
3. Deployment the new codes to test server for IT and User acceptance testing.
4. User Acceptance Testing – Functionality testing.
5. Database server upgrade and migration to Production environment.  This is done after obtaining the user sign-off from the UAT that the application and newly upgrade database server are working as business as usual (BAU).
6. Update the user guides and training for the end users.

In this way, we have worked out the dependencies and outline the implementations that both activites run in parallet and minimize any project schedule’s timelines.