Goodbye 2014, Say Hi 2015!

“Did you just say 365 days are over?” That means a year has come to an end! It felt like just yesterday we wished each other happy new year and now the year has come to an end.

Every day is a routine for each one of us, we only know a change in the day when we wrote a mail or looked at our calendars to see if our project deadlines had neared.  Each of us mourned and pinned on a Monday mornings and danced crazily on Friday afternoons to celebrate the beginning and the end of the week. Four weeks completed a month and soon 12 months have nearly closed a year.

Amidst these mundane working days, every employee at Arowana has had fun along the days of work. If we were to wind the grandfather’s clock of 2014 and take a look at all the activities that have taken place at Arowana. Then here is a gist of it:

Set a resolution target, what are we going to do this year? How many projects will go live? Some resolved to join Arowana toastmasters club, some resolved to learn new software and a few others decided to take up challenges. January brought with a year of challenges, expectations and resolution breaker as well. Arowana Bangalore decided to open the year with a corporate outing to Mango Mist. 

The month with 28 days. Count down began for project go lives from this month. Two Projects had gone live Emaar Retail development Phase II and Du Recon Application Development. The Amazing team award went to Sadiq and his team for their meticulous work.

The month when the ice begins to melt, mostly in countries where it snows. At Arowana the ice began to melt with the rigorous work and effort for CMMI appraisals. The heat began to rise; projects were lined up, project heads and team leads trained for vivas. It was like Arowana appearing for its 10^th board exam. We                                also celebrated International Women’s Day, leaving all the men in envy’s fury.

The summer heat had set in and so were the results of CMMI appraisal. All the members behind the CMMI process bit their nails in anxiousness as the results were announced, “Arowana has been appraised at CMMI Level 3.” It was a midsummer’s night dream come true. The team celebrated at “The Metro” (not the                              station, restaurant to be specific).

Jet Airways Staff travel Management system took its first flight, with the project go live. STMS was rebranded as DART. The creative team of Arowana decided to screen movies every Friday and they began their small initiative with le’ Club. Our most awaited self cum reporting manger’s appraisal results were out. This is the                                    month of actual yearly target  setter

Woh! 6 months already? What is new this month? NBAD development PADGRS project goes live and Lagarccon POS Project goes live. Arowana Toastmasters Club became a distinguished Toastmasters club, completed a year and nominated a new set of Role bearers. 

We all know that Women are 'Kitchen Queens', what we do not know is that women seldom get bored eating their own cooked meal. All the women of Arowana decided to stir their pots and pans together and cook for each other which they called ‘pot luck’.  Arowana has recognized a whole lot of talent in its resources. Each of these talents need to appreciated for their efforts in making the                              company better. A whole lot of employees were recognized and appreciated for                                    their work.

“Sare jahan se acha, hindustan hamaara”, Arowana celebrated Independence Day with a patriotic spirit. All the employees dressed in their best Ethnic attire. As the August rush ended and the monsoons set in OIC HRMS project went live. Design and Content team released the first corporate Newsletter of Arowana “Impressionist”.  Arowana Toastmasters club completed 50 meets.

The month of festivity and flowers. Onam, the harvesting festival of Kerala was celebrated in all grandeur.  TA team of Arowana celebrates the arrival of their 100^th candidate. 

Leaves fall the weather gets pleasant. 10 days of Dasara begins, Arowana celebrates Dasara with Ayudha pooja. This time Kenya Airways Staff Travel Management Development Phase II takes a flight. At the beginning of this month TALK committee began their month long cultural preparation for Kannada Rajyotsava. Arowana featured as one of the top 20 promising enterprise in CIO                                    review magazine. Arowana Toastmasters Club had their first area level contest.                                   Arowana won fastest five Award and Chetana from design team won Triple Crown                             award.

“Elladaru iru enthadaru iru endendigu nee kannadavaagiru” TALK committee put up a Cultural extravaganza on the occasion of Kannada Rajyothsava. Emaar development booking engine went live. The best Talefin edition Halloween was celebrated in a spooky manner. Arowana Dubai had their first pool table tournament. All the men who got envious in the month of March had their day as                                  Arowana Celebrated International Men’s day this year. Our website got good                                         visibility through SEO activities.

Time to pull out your warm clothes, deck the halls of Arowana. Close all those pending projects and wait for your secret Santa task. Arowana Dubai and Bangalore celebrated Christmas. Bid farewell to 2014 and began to prepare for a challenging new year.

Well!! This was Arowana’s 12 month long journey of 2014. A little bit of tension, A little bit of fun. Arowana enjoyed every bit of the old year and are ready to welcome the new. Let us see what is in store for our upcoming year 2015.

Wish you all a joyful and a prosperous New Year 2015.

A small gist of 2014 events

Oracle Tender Management Solutions

Organizations that desire to procure products or services generally try and get the best deal in the market. The more organized ones have empanelled vendors for almost all items the organization wants. They also will have a procurement policy and procedures to ensure that they get the best possible products at the right price from the market. This will enable them to provide in turn, to their customers the best possible products and services.

So what is tender management? In today’s competitive business world, many potential projects and services are put out to tender. That is numerous potential companies are provided with the opportunity to bid for the work.In their bids, they will describe how their company will solve a business problem, provide the service required or supply the goods requested. They will also need to provide a competitive price for this work.The process of designing and writing these proposals or tenders, complete with the competitive pricing, is called tender management, proposal management or bid management.

Managing tenders is a time consuming exercise and a lot of paper work is involved. Manual systems have some merit but are prone to errors and cannot deal with growing volumes of tenders to be managed by both buyers and sellers.A tender management system, either manual or electronic, is required to ensure an effective and efficient process for the buyer who is wishing to source products and services and a seller who bids supply to a company.

A tender management system manages the information content of   a tender being issued. The sourcing professional is often under pressure for time so it is important that the administrative tasks are streamlined and minimized. Securely managed tenders can be issued to selected bidders error free and on time. The content and structure and production of the bid submission and time and resource management for the bidder are managed and the record keeping and audit trail of changes by documenting all material in a repository.

A simple electronic tender management system that permits procurement organizations to manage the main activities in sourcing is a good place to start. It should at least be able to compile online tender documentation, allow the pre-qualifying of suppliers, be able to invite and receive bids. A really good feature is to have a function that allows internal messaging and provides collaboration tools.

There are standard bid management processes available to manage these activities and one published bid methodology. There are also some computerized systems that will manage the workflow of a tender management process but bid management is nowhere as formalized as project management.

This makes experience proposal writers with a history of winning highly sought after.

A tender or bid writer manages risk very well and is always organized and able to manage staff within a very highly charged environment.

Pre- qualification of suppliers is the first part of the system that provides business with one source of accurate, up to date and validated supplier information. Being better informed about the suppliers enables better decision making which in turn reduces risk, saves money and frees up time to focus on higher, value added procurement tasks.

Procurement Tendering Process is the second part of the system, which facilitates the corporate services to streamline and manage the procurement tenders in a centralized manner.

While the concept of tendering may seem daunting at first, it can be easily tackled by having a plan of ‘attack'. When becoming involved in a tendering process, it is important to understand your business' suitability for the project; whether your business' current situation will allow for you to tender, as well as your ability to manage the contract if you are successful in winning the tender. [i]

                                 

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References:

http://toolkit.smallbiz.nsw.gov.au/

http://www.arowanaconsulting.com/

http://www.purchasing-procurement-center.com/

http://www.etenderer.co.uk/

Bridging the Public Cloud Trust Deficit

The dynamicity of dataset in business makes it difficult to maintain the accuracy of data storage. The use of traditional business applications are daunting as business being dynamic the variations of hardware and software required to run these applications are complicated and expensive.

For those businesses which have been living under a rock cloud computing is not just a fad and a big hue and cry, it is the new face of IT. ‘Cloud’ is an umbrella term, but its usage is equally efficient.

CISCO global cloud index forecasts, by 2018, more than three quarters (78 percent) of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 22 percent will be processed by traditional data centers, which simply means that more number of businesses will shift to cloud computing.

With the constant change of your business needs, you would require a solution that offers you the possibility to scale resources up and down in real time based on your current needs. Cloud- based services ensure users can make use of additional services and resources immediately with provisioned and automatically deployed services.

India a blooming E-commerce market and maintaining a consistent online presence is an important characteristic for all companies on today’s market. In order to maintain a large online promotion boost some companies look at investing in new servers which include a whole team of experts to install, configure, test, run, secure, and update them. With Cloud computing a company does not have to invest in additional hardware, when the website can be hosted in cloud. A company’s dynamic servers can be cope with traffic during peak hours without the usage of extra resources. So a company pays only for the services and resources   they need eliminating CapEx costs and there is no tension of unused data either.

If you are looking out for an effective cloud product for collaborative working and a storage solution with a simple and a neat interface, Arowana is a recommended robust cloud solution. The USP of this solution is to provide its users a safe cloud service. As most companies find cloud an efficient solution, on the other hand there is a scepter of risk being involved.

Arowana believes that Public cloud deficit must be breeched, they allow you to store away data on any public cloud or storage systems without worrying about data security and privacy. You are allowed to take complete control of your digital assets irrespective of how or where you are storing your data.

It is important for every business to feel secure about their data. A lot of data requires privacy and control, secure means of transfer and storage therefore a reliable and a patient partner is what any company would require.

Any cloud computing enterprises reputation is built on providing secure, elastic and constantly available services to their customers. Individual companies would not find it efficient to invest thousands of pounds on IT hardware services, but as cloud users they benefit economically since cloud service provides invest a significant amount of money securing their servers, data centers and connections which in turn helps the end users.

Now companies can rein in IT costs, because the best thing about cloud computing is that the services can help companies be more responsive to market conditions. Depending on the need of a company cloud computing can do several different things in a secure way.

Since more companies have begun drifting towards cloud usage, the security will be ensured bridging the gap of risk factor and public deficit.

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STAFF TRAVEL SIMPLIFIED

My mother announced, “let us go to Mumbai this weekend, can you go and book the flight tickets tomorrow?” I calmly looked at her and opened my laptop, typed the names of a few booking sites checked the itinerary and voila! In a matter of 10 minutes the tickets were booked. I showed my mother a printed form. A surprised mother exclaimed “booking has become this easy?”

Well yes, booking has indeed become so easy. In the age of gadgets where everything is either at the click of a mouse or at the touch of a tab any transactions can be made in a fraction of a second.

With the e-commerce industry blooming day by day, all manual activities have become lazy and easy to do. All this is achieved by a set of back end coding done to the software.

As I sat at the airport waiting to catch my flight, I noticed a bunch of flight attendants giggling and checking in for duty. It is a fact that ground staff members of an airline get incentives in the form of free or discounted ticket claims based on their designations and grades. When it comes to business, it is not as easy as I booked a flight ticket. There are various claim procedures which an airline staff member has to follow to claim his duty travel ticket. This is a manual job for both the employer and employee.

In that case how about an easy booking system for an airline? This will reduce a lot of paper work, manual update errors, easier claim approvals and a better maintenance.

The concept of a staff travel management system is not new, there are several airlines using this software, which has been inbuilt. Arowana is not an airline company, it is a software development company which provides ready to use products that are customizable to suit your needs.

DART is one such product of Arowana, created for staff travel management systems. A product which has been used as a solution by three large clients, is software simplified for booking process.

DART means a quick movement, in a similar way Arowana’s product dart is a fast and easy tool for airline staff members, a product which can be access easily without hassles from anywhere at any point of time.

DART has various features developed under the same roof for different department purpose such as booking system for the staff, HR tracking and maintenance for the admin department and the approval sessions for senior and reporting officers. A staff member can avail a ticket for either duty purpose or for leisure travel. A claim can be made based on number of tickets available for a staff or based on the discounted rates.

A staff member has no major hassles while booking a ticket and can enjoy a wonderful weekend away from work. If booking sites like MakeMyTrip, Yatra, Goibibo have made my booking easy, fun and fast, in the similar way DART has made the booking of airline staff members simple and fast.

DART, an airline staff travel management system simplified.

Follow us at: stafftravelsystem.com
www.arowanaconsulting.com