Company get together Sept 2007

Ever since Agilent spun off from Hewlett Packard in 1999/2000, the Sales office in Malaysia has undergone many changes. We had to move from Wisma Cyclecarri in Jalan Raja Laut to Uptown 2 in Petaling Jaya. We have had 3 General Manager changed since then. We are now into our 4th Site Manager. I guess we have gotten so small that it makes no sense to call him the GM. Previously, we had a management council, of which I was part of. With the new site manager, the managers are part of the site committee. I look at the telephone directory of the first year we became an independent company with the trading symbol A on the NYSE and find that almost 85% of those people has left the company under one guise or another. Agilent itself has sold off the Medical Products division to Philips Medical Systems. We spun off Avago which was part of the Test and Measurement business. And then we spun off Verigy, part of the Automated Test systems. Today we have Electronic Measurement Group and the Bio Analytical Group.
With a capacity of 77 cubicles, we only have a total of 35 employees and another 15 non Agilent workers (contractual/ temporary staff). During the separation from HP, we had >80 employees. WOW!!

Chew Teck Ming took over the role of site manager since July 2007 and has since tried to institute some basic changes like cleaning up the office environment to reflect on the Sales office identity. Today, he delivered his first coffee talk which was filled with talk, cheesecakes, nasi dagang, carbonated soft drinks, BUT NO COFFEE!! :)


So after the update on the state of the company and the 2 major businesses, we celebrated the birthday of 2 of our colleagues - Ben and Jason. And lunch was a sort of sumptuous Nasi Dagang catered by Village Park. Round about 2pm, everyone started making a beeline for U-Bowl at I Utama. We had 7 lanes booked for friendly bowling games with the objective of team building.



Each team was mixed and matched with members from EMG and LSCA. There were some surprises. Some of these guys are GOOD, but inconsistent. In the end, EVERY team won something. 7 teams took part and 7 teams won hampers.

We had almost half a day off for team building. I guess that accounts for something.