Wedderburn CIO Vi Lam made redundant

Wedderburn’s Australia and New Zealand CIO, Vi Lam, has been made redundant following a restructure at the weighing scales, packaging and POS system manufacturer.

Lam, who started at Wedderburn as a software engineer way back in 1994, is believed to be one of several senior managers moved on as the organisation looks to cut costs.

Lam wrote the first piece of Windows-based software at the organisation that enables PCs to communicate with weighing scales. He also created Wedderburn’s IT infrastructure from the ground up, which now supports 350 users across the organisation.

In 1997, Lam became Wedderburn’s network administrator and spent the following five years building networks that connected the organisation’s branches. He moved Wedderburn’s ERP system from a hosted service provider to the organisation’s infrastructure in-house, and engaged Optus to provide WAN infrastructure.

In March 2002, Lam became IT manager at Wedderburn, a role which he held for almost 12 years before becoming CIO in January 2014. Lam managed a lean IT team that consisted of an analyst/programmer, two system administrators and a first level support staffer.

As CIO, Lam led transformation projects across the organisation. One of these initiatives is the replacement of paper-based processes across its service department with a mobility solution.

“Up until then we would create a service job on the ERP system, print it out and then either ring or SMS a technician to tell him about a job and send the paperwork to him.

“The problem with that was that technicians rarely came back to the office particularly if they work at remote branches. So it took a long time for them to get back and do invoicing –people had to type everything in again so there was a lot of double-handling. Technicians were scheduling jobs on white boards,” he said.

The service mobility solution streamlined this process. Technicians use a mobile app to fill out details relating to the fault that was repaired on the scale, the materials that were used, and the time it took to complete the job. These details are automatically sent the organisation’s ERP system ready to be invoiced.

Wedderburn declined to comment.