Problem Solving in Manila – Persistence - Christina Ng

Our Deutsche Bank’s facility management project in Manila is very big. It occupies three buildings and has a very large footprint. It also requires a large pool of dedicated resources.

The setting up process is led by our Colliers FM team from Jakarta, working closely with our Colliers International office in Manila. We started the project in December 2008 under a very tight time frame for the transition/setting up. We practically took over the project from the incumbent party in only two weeks. Some people call that suicidal, but we call it a success.

Christina Ng, our Associate Director played a very important role in training all the new and existing staff assigned to the project. She is also involved in monitoring the progress of the project during and after the setting up process.

There are still some loose ends in the project as we observed. The project requires a senior person to examine the problems and the possible solutions. We then decided to send Christina back to Manila to handle this problem-solving.

Christina spent about two months in Manila. It sounds simple, but it was really not. She had to leave everything behind in Jakarta for this and was practically alone overseas. Yet she had a huge task to do.

Christina was equipped with Colliers FM Root Cause Analysis, a method innovated in Jakarta to systematically identify a problem, its root cause, the potential strategy to solve it and a way to track the follow-up. She diligently implemented the method. This, of course, was not as easy as it seems. There were challenges and a certain level of difficulty facing her, bearing in mind that this is a very large project and involved so many stakeholders. It required a lot of persistence. She also needed to ‘manage’ senior level management from Colliers International’s own management, as well as the client.

At the end, Christina successfully completed this task. The Asia Pacific Corporate Real Estates and Services of Deutsche Bank AG was impressed with Christina.

Challenging Job in Bangkok – Diligence – Cinthya Kusumadewi

Cinthya Kusumadewi is the first Indonesian Facility Manager to be sent overseas as an expat to lead a local facility management team. Her task was to lead the setting up process of Deutsche Bank project in Bangkok, Thailand.

Leading a setting up process is a challenging job, taking over a project from a competitor, taking over the premises from the project manager - as the project is a new premises located at a brand new office building in downtown Bangkok, the Athenee Tower. As Cinthya had to lead an entirely new team, the job was even more challenging. She needed to lead the recruitment/selection, training and the actual handover from the incumbent party and the setting up of hundreds of tasks of the Facility Management service. There was, of course, a team behind Cinthya; the whole process was under the leadership of Christina Ng, our Associate Director, who spent about two weeks in Bangkok to lead the training program to new staff as well as coordinating the handover process from the incumbent party to Colliers FM. Colliers FM also sent Deyla Novera and Arif Dharmawan during the setting up process to assist Cinthya in the areas of Facility Administration, Business Support Services, Helpdesk and IT. They worked closely together with the Colliers International Thailand’s team.

For Cinthya, what was more challenging was that she had to leave everything behind in Jakarta and do all of these tasks in Bangkok within a defined time frame. The schedule was very tight and the workload huge. Yet there were challenges that she faced daily: cultural differences, language barriers and the high expectations of the client.

Almost daily, Cinthya had to work until late at night and also during the weekend, both Saturdays and Sundays. Definitely, Bangkok was not a holiday destination for her, despite the promotion of the Thailand’s government.

At the end, all of this hard work paid off. Cheyenne Tan, Deutsche Bank’s Head of Facilities Solutions, South East Asia said, “I am impressed by how Cinthya managed to keep her cool in many of the difficult situations she faced when working in Bangkok.” Johnson Tan, Deutsche Bank’s Head of Engineering Operation Asia Pacific said, “Cinthya is very mature in the work and is professional in handling client feedback and requests”.

The Excel Project: Energy Conservation Project Excellently Done – Initiative – Dyah Ita

Colliers FM has been implementing a large scale Energy Conservation initiative for our clients. We have managed to bring Citi Indonesia to #2 rank in Asia Pacific in their Energy Conservation initiative in 2007 (The Candlelight Project) ahead of Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, etc. We also brought another project of ours, Graha Pangeran to win the ASEAN Energy Award back in 2002.

We wanted to take our Energy Conservation initiative to a new level. Dyah Ita was assigned to lead this initiative back in Feb ’09. It all started with a blank paper and a lot of ambition. How do we take what we have done to a new level of play?

Dyah started by gathering accurate data of our client’s energy profile at each facility. This effort alone takes quite an effort, because Dyah needs to gather, validate and analyze data from hundreds of properties. From the energy profile Dyah managed to identify potential areas of improvement, as well as best practices across the facilities in the portfolio.

It is very interesting to see all ingenious best practices implemented by our Supervisors in 12 cities in Indonesia and how those can be shared and implemented in other cities. Dyah led the sharing of initiatives.

All of these are done whilst continuously validating and analyzing all energy data daily, so that any discrepancy with the targeted energy consumption can be tackled quickly before it creates a big impact on the energy bill. This is done by Yuliani Novel, Deyla Novera, Relawaty, Dera Herawaty.

One of the initiatives is to upgrade the electrical installation in Citi’s branches using the latest technology in MCB. This initiative needs a certain investment and requires solid financial analysis, as the client is a bank. The installation of this is under the co-ordination of our Engineer, Adhe Dandy Yulianto, who did a great job.

This initiative has resulted in a very significant saving to Citi, and has been acknowledged by Citi’s CRS Regional Management in Asia Pacific. At the end of August 09, Citi has adopted this initiative as a regional initiative to be implemented in 13 countries across Asia Pacific. Another great result based on good character and initiative.