Brownout, Brownout, Brownout!!!

I could not judge who is responsible for or what the reasons of the brownouts are in Manila lately. All I know is that I have felt the damage first-hand. To some degree, I could somehow understand the necessity of these brownouts - something related to El Niño. On the other hand, I could also feel the frustrations, especially in the business community, on how these brownouts are being managed. If under the current circumstances, there is nothing humanly doable to prevent these brownouts, there could at least be some measures to manage the damage that it could cause and has already caused especially to the business communities. So far, the 2 brownouts that occurred this week have already caused us the following:

1. Decreased productivity. Of course, lost operating hours means lost production time.

2. Increased operating cost. Due to lost time during regular office hours, many of our employees opted to work overtime so they can finish works on schedule, with overtime pay rate, of course. Nevertheless, I still consider ourselves lucky that we have employees who have the initiative to make up for the lost work hours.

3. Lost communications with clients. For a BPO company catering to clients as far as half-way around the globe, communication is a factor that could make or break your entire operations and could even determine your company's survivability in this highly competitive industry. Lost communications could mean lost opportunities, or worse, lost reputation. I hope the reactive explanation we sent to our clients would help, still we could not provide enough explanation on why the interruptions were so unpredictable.

4. Lost data. The first brownout occurred so suddenly that some of my works got lost. Though Excel automatically recovers the file that one is working on prior to the power outage, it would still lost about 5 minutes of your latest works. If you are not lucky enough, you might end up reworking entire workbooks.

Of course, there are also some shortcomings on our end. The owner of our condo unit did not connect our office to the building's emergency power circuit. We don't have UPS's that allows our computer to go on live for some time even after the brownout. If these brownouts continue, we certainly have to work on these areas.

On the other hand, I am still wondering why Meralco and/or the power generation companies could not create a predictable advance schedules of these brownouts. I have been calling Meralco hot line 16211 many times already. I learned they can only confirm schedule on the day of the brownout itself. This would mean we can only have few hours to prepare for the necessary adjustments on our operation schedule. For our kind of business, a week advance notice is ideal. For now, I just have to call Meralco every morning of each workday just to see if there is a scheduled brownout for the day. I just hope and pray that this crisis will soon be over or at least Meralco and those power generating companies could get those advance schedules working the soonest possible time.