Mr Naufil Mahmud of Karachi Electricity Supply Company on managing foreign SAP consultants
Channel: Tom Raftery
Date: 2013-02-05

At the recent SAP for Utilities event in Singapore I had a brief chat with Mr Naufil Mahmud of Karachi Electricity Supply Company about the talk he gave there.

Here is the transcript of our conversation:

Tom Raftery: Hi everyone! Welcome to GreenMonk TV. We are here at the SAP for Utilities Conference in Singapore and with me I have Naufil from Karachi Electric Power Supply Company Ltd.

 Naufil, you gave us a talk this morning about the kind of practical issues you faced in Pakistan around the rollout of your billing solution, can you give us a synopsis around that now?

Sardar Naufil Mahmud: Yeah, sure! First of all, KESC, Karachi Electric Supply Company was the first one to start on this project. There are about nine other utilities in Pakistan, and so we are actually setting up the role model for the energy sector in Pakistan.

 We started using ISU, and immediately the first challenge was that we don't find any of those consultants or people trained in the use of this. So we had to go for foreign consultants. You might know that Pakistan doesn't really sort of figure very high on places to visit for consultants. So we had actually three sets of consultants changed over the duration of the project. 

Tom Raftery: Well, why did they change?
 
Sardar Naufil Mahmud: Well, first time it was -- I would sort of maybe focus on the consultants coming in and the company that brought them in, not really understanding the challenges that they would face in terms of coming into a country like Pakistan and how to ensure that the consultant stay on. 

 Second time around there was an issue related with security in Pakistan, which was not really the case, so, because we had other consultants who kept on the project. So I think it's more to do with the ability to get the right type of consultants into Pakistan, and to be able for them to complete the project all the way through to the end. And so, by the second time around we sort of figured that out, and so we had to start building up for those eventualities and that's what we did in terms of building our own team, which was able to work with the consultants coming in and in those interim periods they were able to continue with the project to finish pretty much on time that we had projected to the management.

Tom Raftery: Okay. So you brought your own team up to the levels of the consultants so that they could take over when the consultants left?

Sardar Naufil Mahmud: Exactly! And the way we did that was that, like I mentioned in my presentation, we got the brightest students coming out of the different universities, showed them that you will be working on a project which is new to the country, which got them excited, and as they worked with the foreign consultants, they were able to pick up, and that was part of our understanding with the consultants as well, that they have to transfer knowledge so that our team could actually take it on from there.

 Because the whole concept was, we were not going with the big bang theory, we want to do is as a rollout project, so we wanted to first go live with maybe small area about 200,000 consumers, and then we wanted our team to be trained enough to actually carry that over to rest of the two million consumers, so a total of 2.2 millions consumers that we have.

Tom Raftery: Okay, great! Naufil, that's been fantastic! Thanks for talking to us today.

Sardar Naufil Mahmud: Thank you!