When we started on our process of building Millie in August 2018 we had no idea what we were doing. We were fortunate that Q4 - a specialist company in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) took a chance on us and gave us a fixed price for building the Annual Review process with Millie.
From day one - we were allocated Saravanan Sankar as our developer. When Q4 were sold to EY, the owner of Q4 recommended that Moneyworks work directly with Saravanan (in August 2022). Since then, Saravanan has contracted directly to Moneyworks, and we are very fortunate that with 7 solid years of working on Millie, Saravanan knows Millie inside and out.
But - having said that, we have built so many processes for Millie that sometimes either he or we forget what she does [that is another project for Carey - updating all our documentation on our processes as they continually change].
Saravanan is in his mid 30's and lives in Chennai - where temperatures regularly get into the mid 40°C in mid summer. Saravanan and his wife Kavitha have two sons (aged 8 and 2) and as well as working with Moneyworks, he enjoys hiking and spending lots of time with his family.
He holds a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering and a Diploma in Information Technology. Although he is trained on both major Robotic Process Automation platforms, Blue Prism and UiPath, with Moneyworks he works exclusively on the UiPath platform.
We communicate with Saravanan through WhatsApp (lots of messages) and email and the occasional video call when things are too complicated to discuss in writing.
The time difference between Chennai and New Zealand is generally 6 1/2 hours (depending on NZ daylight saving). This means that Saravanan starts work after he walks his son to school - around 9-10.30 in the morning in Chennai (which is about 3.30 - 5.00 New Zealand time in winter), and then works through the night New Zealand time to have work for us to check the next morning.
When we wake up, if we are working on projects there are usually messages for us to check at about 6.30 -7.00am and depending on the urgency and how much more work needs to be done, Saravanan will keep working up to around 10am NZ time - which is about 3.30am Chennai time.
The core thing that Saravanan does when there aren't projects is to monitor Millies processes and identify any 'breakages' - and there are breakages regularly - more on that in another article.
But the key is creating new processes. In mid 2024 we thought we had finished programming all our processes, then we decided to move investment WRAP platform and that has created a lot of work!
We back up all of Millies processes every week, and have most of them fully documented and we have information on New Zealand based companies that could introduce us to a new developer. But given the accumulated knowledge, we would prefer to keep working with Saravanan for a long time. And particularly as his english has improved so much over the last 7 years and he understands our jargon and shorthand and our internal names for documents and files and processes.
