“A power outage can be catastrophic for the economy,” said Fabia Tetteroo-Bueno, Country Manager of Philips Philippines, during the campaign launch on Wednesday. “We lose the comfort of our homes and the stability of livelihood and business.

“It will impact all sectors—consequently, it will take the unified efforts of all these sectors to prevent it from happening in the future.”

Jointly organized by Philips, Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft mbH (DEG) Bank, World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Philippines, and the European Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines (ECCP), the #MayMagagawaKa campaign seeks to raise awareness and build urgency on energy conservation in the country.

The campaign comes on the heels of the Malampaya maintenance shutdown—which left a 700-megawatt void in the local power grid and renewed the mounting calls for energy conservation in the country.

“When it comes to power interruptions, it affects the quality of power and disrupts business,” said Henry Schumacher, Executive Vice President of ECCP.

“It is hoped that the measures undertaken by the private sector in joining the Interruptible Load Program (ILP), implementing energy savings, and energy efficiency investments will avoid power outages this summer.”

The ILP program is a proposed set of contingency measures to manage electrical consumption amid the Malampaya shutdown, including the use of generators as an alternative power source for private companies, as saving energy is also an emerging environmental issue.

• DTSI PAYS TRIBUTE TO ITS LOYAL CUSTOMERS AND PARTNERS

Diversified Technology Solutions International (DTSI) Group, a global provider of business solutions, paid tribute to its loyal clients and business partners in a dinner that featured the country’s leading economist who gave an optimistic forecast about the Philippine economy.

“DTSI would like to show its appreciation to our loyal customers and partners by conducting an event where we treated them to an informational cocktail and dinner as a way of showing how grateful we are for their continued support and trust through the years,” said DTSI Group President and CEO Miguel Garcia.

“This is our way of giving a little back to our clients and letting them enjoy a fine and intimate event,” said Garcia. “We want to give them a good way to start the new year, and also to hear for themselves the economic outlook from the leading economist in the country.”

In a pre-dinner presentation, economist Bernardo Villegas of the University of Asia and the Pacific gave an upbeat prognosis on the economy. He said the country’s gross domestic product will likely expand 6 to 7 percent this year, boosted by remittances from overseas Filipino workers, earnings from the booming BPO sector, and higher domestic consumption.

Villegas also pointed out that the IT and the BPO sectors have been growing at an unprecedented pace, a testament to the Filipinos’ technology savvy that’s at par with the best in the world.

The appreciation dinner was held recently at the Hotel Intercontinental in Makati City. NTT SVP and Head of Global Business Katsumi Nakata, who flew in from Tokyo to attend the event, as well as bankers from Metrobank and Mizuho Bank also attended the event.

• PORTFOLIOMNL.COM GOES ONLINE

PortfolioMNL.com, an online platform that gathers and showcases creative talent for hire, has recently unveiled 17 partner academic and institutions and creative organizations across the Philippines.

PortfolioMNL.com is one the first batch of technology startups backed by IdeaSpace Foundation.

“Filipino creative professionals are recognized and sought throughout the world for their talent and innovation, specifically in emerging industries such as animation and game design,” said Rina Malonzo, a former New York-based creative director who is a co-founder and CEO of Portfolio MNL.

The Network Portals give local and foreign employers access to thousands of creative talent across the Philippines. On the digital marketplace, employers can view jobseekers’ multimedia work samples and resumes.

Employers may search for individual creative by skill, experience level, or location, or search within specific organizations.

“Our Network Portals tear down the logistical barriers to discovering untapped creative talents, providing growth opportunities for both creatives and the companies that hire them,” says Rina.

“We are thrilled to launch our Network with creative schools and organizations that are furiously developing world-class creative talent.

With these partnerships, we look forward to doing our part in empowering creative innovation on a national and global scale.”

Since its launch in 2013, PortfolioMNL.com has been a go-to among employers seeking Filipino creative interns, freelancers, and full-time hires. With over 2,500 members and instant access to sample work and resumes, hiring creative – app developers, architects, editors, fashion designers, furniture designers, illustrators, industrial designers, photographers, stylist, video editors, writers, programmers, and the list goes on.

• BDO UPGRADES PHONEBANKING AND CONTACT CENTER INFRASTRUCTURE WITH ASPECT’S UNIFIED PLATFORM SOLUTION

BDO Unibank, Inc. (BDO), one of the Philippines’ leading banks, has successfully completed a major upgrade of its contact center infrastructure to further improve its customer engagement and automate its core processes for better management of customer communications. The refitting is part of BDO’s objectives to continuously strengthen relationships with its customers.

BDO has deployed technologies from Aspect Software, a US-headquartered, leading provider of fully-integrated customer interaction management, workforce optimization, back-office and award-winning cloud solutions.

“We are constantly in pursuit of not only providing our customers with the right products and services but also improving their customer experience. Having a reliable and robust contact center platform is critical to enable us to provide better service and relieve our contact center officers of manual tasks,” BDO said.

“We are thrilled to equip BDO with an integrated, single solution to optimize all their resources. BDO has realized the benefits of the system we have implemented and we are confident that they will be able to gain more value from the streamlining of their Inbound and Backroom Units as their back-office teams increase in size,” said Richard Loberas, Director – Strategic Accounts, APAC, Aspect Software.

Benefits from using Aspect’s Unified IP contact center technology include BDO’s contact center’s increased service and productivity levels due to the solution’s multi-site call distribution and agent screen-pop features as well as shorter handling times for customer feedback tasks with the use of a predictive dialer. 

Source: Manila Bulletin