FB et al in the Office

It's more than a month now since we blocked facebook and youtube from our office network from 8:30 - 12 and 1:30 - 5:30.  I wonder how people here have reacted over it.

It's actually been debated since early 2009, whether to do just that or not.  The primary problem then was loss of productivity.  Restaurant City and Farmville (along with Plants vs Zombies) were grave dangers to work time.  Even before, non-stop chatting in YM was already an issue.  It seems staying largely unseen by the boss was enough temptation for quite a few.

By large, I resisted having a permanent ban on FB along with some other sites.  We want our people to choose the right thing, and be smart about stuff like this. FB and other sites can be good stress relievers after all. 

2009 Team building helped some with that regard.  After that, clear and blatant abuse were less common, although it was still much of a problem with people stationed  in unwatched, far away places.

2010 however brought even more important reasons to do something about it. High bandwidth streaming sites like Youtube was hurting our VPN and email.  Then sometimes, we find people fighting because of some status update commonly read wrong or hitting too close to the heart, or below the belt.  People here are getting their fun in FB at the expense of others, methinks.

(There's something ironic when people fight because of something said in Facebook.  It was supposed to help connect people.  But on those times, it was virtually helping connect punches between otherwise good friends.  People stopped talking straight.  FB was replacing normal human interaction.  Scary.)

One interim step I took was to temporarily disable web access to certain sites to specific computers that were found exceeding their "breaktime" quota.  But that's unnecessarily Big Brother for me. 

So we're now where we are.  In the mean time, they're off-limits during work hours.  Hello to shorter lunch time.

Letterhead Through the Years

Our company letterhead has gone through several iterations over the the last decade. I still remember the first one with the red A over the M logo.  That was maybe 1997.  If I find a copy of that one, I'll post it here.

2000 - 2005 Letterhead

 

Our early 200x logo just slightly evolved over 5 years as we added brand logos in the footer.  We used A.O. Smith's electrical motor logo rather the Water Heaters logo, even though we were much bigger into water heaters than motors.

2006 - 2008 Letterhead

 

This revision was due to a change in logo.  As part of a marketing strategy, we wanted "Water Systems" in our logo.  "Amici" as a word is obviously rather generic.  The Amici pizza shop wasn't commercialized then.  Nowadays, we get confused reactions from callers mistaking us for the pizza parlor. 

 2008 - 2009 Letterhead

A designer's rendition of our letterhead.  Minimalistic design.  Symmetry.

2010 Letterhead

This is really just a minor revision.  A line of brand logos was added to put some connection to water products.

2011 Letterhead Revisions

This year's letterhead is a major revamp.  Why another change?  The 2010's line of logo felt tacked in.  The 2008 design is elegant, but sometimes we need the company name somewhere there.

In the header are the company logo and specific company details.  To adapt the letterhead to our other branches, only the header needs to be modified.

I have had mixed reactions to the logo placement on the upper right corner.  It's definitely not common.  Nevertheless, I felt a right aligned header magnifies reader focus to the content of the letter. 

In previous iterations of this design, all the letterhead text are grayed instead of solid black to further emphasize the document content.  But printing issues have made the text too dithered and illegible.  So we settled with solid black.

The lower left box of brand logos balances the weight of the upper right header placement.  The logos are small but recognizable.  It might be an issue if you read things with a magnifying glass.  But again, I didn't want the all-too-many logos to detract reader focus.  When the reader, out of curiosity, gives attention to the small logos, she will hopefully not find it hard to distinguish the brands we represent.

The lower center box are tag lines of our products and markets, centered for the persons unfamiliar in our industry.  Our website is also put here at the bottom, to act as a portal for the recipient to get more company information.

Last but not the least, the lower right box emphasizes to the reader the national level of our business.

Store Front

With another new year, I thought it unforgivable that our store front hasn't changed much over the years.  Our original store name from 1997 had been effectively erased by a bus accident.  Now, it's even covered by the guard house.  Some effort had been put in 1999, although virtually only "Water Systems" is visible from the street.

Last year, I put a Sta-Rite tarp on the left of the store.  I was elated to get an inquiry on pool products a few weeks after.  (These things have effects after all.)  Towards October I also added an Aermotor poster.  And then we temporarily moved office as we started renovations.  Unfortunately, after the renovations finished, I couldn't find the Sta-Rite tarp anymore. 

2010 ended and a new year began.  We stopped a bit to focus on our primary work.  And pretty much no effort was being made any more on our store front.

While a good store front might be a secondary priority for a company like us, since we are primarily a wholesaler, not taking advantage of our front might be remiss of marketing savvy.

We are located at Mayon St. (or Avenue, according to PLDT), and it's not a small street at all.  It's a commercial street, though new developments have only started the past few years.  We are two blocks away from Suki Market, we're near the local church and baranggay hall, and SM's Sun Residences is rising at the South end of Mayon.

So, to me, that we would not do even simple steps to increase our marketing presence is a loss of opportunity.  So what did I do?  I brought an unused plastic holder back to life and filled it with excess fliers and brochures.  I hung a big A.O. Smith tarp by our window -- it still needs ironing though.  I rummaged a "farmland" beside our store, and found a ready-to-be-thrown Atmor sign from our retail days.  I taped it at the window in a not-so-nice way.  I saw the Aermotor banner hanging by the guard house, but it looked too drab now so I decided against it.  Instead, I'd been eyeing two more tarps from our exhibits.  They looked nice and green and could work effectively to accentuate our sky blue office.  All these hacks weren't so hard.

Next one should be a nicer store sign.  Hmmm, we could even use our underwater lights to put on a colorful show.  Not.  Well, at least a store sign with big nice letters.  And then, afterwards?  Perhaps our service vans and motor bikes...

Christmas Around The Corner

It's December.  I almost forgot that this blog has turned one year old already!  I just read the original post, entitled "December", and it was amusing to read that back then, I was writing about renovations.

Much changed since then.  A major renovation actually happened (although it's not quite finished).  The vibrant blue of our office gave way to a lighter shade of pale.  The garage is now actually empty, and almost setup for residence.

And then again, there are the people.  We've experience the highest rate of employee turnover over this year, due in part to improvements in our processes and better checks and balances.  Some key personnel have left to chase their dreams or to look for peace.  They will be sorely missed.  More have moved on to other work where they have found their new homes.  To them, we wish luck and a better life.

Meanwhile, with Christmas around the corner, everyone has turned busy bee for the Christmas preps.  Perhaps with all the changes that have happened, the Christmas party is one more comfort for our restless minds.  After all, we managed to miss the Team Building event this year.  At least the year-end party is a vestige of the days merry past.

It's been a difficult year.  But we have higher hopes still.

Moved In!

Finally, for what felt like a long time, we've moved in to our new office!  It's still the same location, right by the precarious intersection of Mayon and M. Cuenco, where a Florida bus once hit the corner of our humble store, by the border between Quezon City and Manila.  But with a new paint, wiring and cables, new tables and chairs and partitions, and a much more sensible arrangement for employees, our office felt imbued with a breath of new life. 

Right now, it's not yet a 100% done, mission accomplish project.  There are still the oddities from our office's previous iterations like the uncovered section of the aircon's vent as well as the out-of-place legacy PBX hopelessly visible and the unchanged long haul cabling up and about the office and nearby departments.  There are still undefined or temporary locations for telecom and printing equipments.  And people places will still be changing with time.  We still have lots of ideas to improve.  This may be a relatively short term fix for capacity stress.  But fixing we will do.  For us right now, we can accept and embrace the changes moving forward.  And we like it like that.

Office Renovation

For a lot of people who've seen our Metro Manila office, one thing obvious was that it was very crowded.  That impression is amplified on those mid-morning hours when everyone was there -- on those times, it was a market place. (Not on those times, it was just an internet cafe.)


Over the past week, however, it's been desert empty, save for the workers and the dust.  We're finally on our scheduled major office renovation!  We're expecting the project to finish in a couple of weeks or so.  In the mean time, we've moved half of us to the obliging service department next door, and the other half to the training room of our sister company Thermovar Pipes.

Moving and subdividing our office to nearby locations is not without challenges.  We had to minimize phone, fax, computer and network downtime as we reshaped our infrastructure for our ad hoc relocation.  Fortunately, with just a little shuffling, network cabling wasn't too hard; we were able to reuse most of our network cables.  Sales executive Alexis Garcia, our resident telecom expert by night, managed the rewiring of our phone and fax system to working order.

This project is a major makeover that's long overdue.  There's been so many changes over the years that has stretched our office capacity to its limits.  With this over, we expect to maximize space in our humble office and to increase overall efficiency in our operations.

Walk-In and Phone-Order Sales

Early this year, we started diligently classifying sales whether they're sales booked by agent, ordered through phone, or walk-in sales.  We have a lot more sale types like "project" and "key" but we haven't yet discussed the "proper" classification of sales.

I primarily requested due diligence in proper sales classification to measurably monitor an aspect of customer satisfaction.  Since we have stocks at two different locations -- our in-store "walk-in"cache of popular goods and our 15-to-20-minute-away warehouse, I wanted to know how often do we make our walk-in customers wait a long time for their orders to arrive.

How do we know if a sale should be a walk-in sale?  The question seems simple enough.  But there are some aspects that need clarification.  An unannounced customer literally walking-in on our store is obviously a walk-in sale.  But what do we do about customers we got to talk on the phone or email?  For these "announced" customers, if their order is vague or unclear during previous dialog, we still categorize them as walk-in sales.  But if their order is known before their arrival, we consider that as phone-order booking.

It is still a question if we should even segregate walk-in sales from phone-order bookings.  Phone-order bookings have a propensity to be changed upon customer arrival.  Based on our records, phone-order bookings and walk-in sales constitute less than 2% of our sales.  That is still substantial however, and surprising for our humble office with hardly space to accommodate waiting customers.