December 2003 Issue No. 9

Lead Story

New Portal, New Experience The World of the EMSTF e-Portal

Flash back to a world before e-banking. You had to queue up at the bank to complete your urgent financial transactions.

With e-banking, your life changed. No more queuing up. You see your entire portfolio and conduct transactions by a few clicks. You can do it anytime, anywhere. You have all the information at your fingertips to make better financial decisions.

The Banking Analogy

A similar transformation is taking place at EMSTF. With our new EMSTF e-portal, the customer will begin to experience the convenience of electronic delivery of some of our services. The e-portal is a series of websites, each tailor-made for one customer department. Here's how it works.

Suppose you are the operations manager of an indoor games hall. You arrive at your office in the morning, log into the e-portal, select “Venue Specific Information” under the “Client's On-line Information”, and click into your venue. You get information specific to your department's needs, covering job progress, maintenance schedules, overview of major equipment and its spare parts stock level, among others.

How it Helps Your Work

As you sip your morning coffee and scroll the screens, you recall that a badminton competition is coming up. You click into “Preventive Maintenance Schedule” to check that certain maintenance works will be completed before the competition. Then you start to plan budget and cash flow projections, after retrieving some more information from the e-portal. You finish your work without wasting time on searching paper files, because there is no need to.

Communications, Service Delivery, Transparency

The e-portal can do many other things. You can send us an email 24 hours a day via the e-portal requesting a quote for specific services, make a suggestion, or ask a question. You can report a fault and request fault services. We are also planning to build in a subsequent service status tracking system. The e-portal is a perfect starting point, as an integrated communication platform, to contact us. It is designed to make EMSTF operations more transparent and accessible.

The e-portal has three parts:

(1)		a password protected information database for major E&M systems maintained by EMSTF at client venues, with details of respective Service Level Agreements;
(2)		a platform to allow clients to provide any time on-line feedback or make requests for service;
(3)		an overview of EMSTF's technology applications, special projects, and our engineering capabilities.

Security

Security and data protection is our top priority. The e-portal is built on the Government GNET (Government Backbone Network) or on client's intranet platform through dedicated servers. All on-line data specific to clients and venues are password protected. The main server is installed in our data centre, manned 24-hours by EMSTF's in-house IT team to ensure maximum security and reliability.

Future Plans

As the examples show, the e-portal will save time and cost for clients and also become the source of digitised information for analysis and planning. Managing E&M facilities will become a simple, productive activity. The e-portal may also be modified to cope with future changes in customers' operations or organisation.

Our vision is to make the e-portal a powerful data search tool, fully integrated with EMSD's enhanced Corporate Computer System and Enterprise Resource Planning System to be installed in our new Headquarters. This means that customers may use the e-portal as an interface to capitalise on the powerful features of our Corporate Computer System to achieve greater efficiency in facility maintenance and management.

We have launched pilot sites for several customers during 2003. As other sites are being planned in consultation with customers and will be launched in phases, the level of information each customer can access at this stage will vary. We urge all our customers to log in the e-portal at http://emstf.ccgo.hksarg , try it, and let us have your valuable feedback.

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