Annex 10: short description of an IT intervention

 

She started working with this group of companies in 2010. First in the Portuguese company and some months later in the Angolan company. The operation of one company depends on the operation of the other. The Portuguese company buys pharmaceuticals and medical equipment all over the world, to export to the Angolan counterpart that it is charged of selling to pharmacies, clinics, and hospitals in Angola.

All the control and management are done in Portugal.

When she started, every morning, the PDF listings of the sales of the day before, were sent from Angola by email to managers in Portugal. Then, in Portugal, they were reintroduced by hand (one-by-one) in spreadsheets, which should guide the management/purchases to be made, to export tom Angola. In this way they did not produce the results in time to make purchases, send them (by boat, in most of the cases), and be sold when they were most lacking in Angola. It was a highly inefficient management.

In the Portuguese company, they operated with the office and the warehouse in separate facilities. In the office they had a small local network and server so poorly structured that it didn't even allow communication between the office's PCs. In the warehouse they were interconnected by network cables, but they only shared the printer. There was supposed to be a VPN connection between the warehouse and the office, but no one had been able to get it up and running. In Angola they had a small warehouse in a basement, where they had a small local Workgroup network, with a PC sharing the billing program.

During the ten years she supported these companies she restructured all the informatic systems, the computer network, the internet access, and the energy systems powering all the equipment.  When her collaboration with these companies ended, in December 2019, they already had a small data center in operation since 2015, at the facilities in Portugal. This small datacenter was based on two hosts, one redundant storage and Vmware EXi. Since 2017, a third company has been added to the group, a five-star hotel in Lisbon, whose servers were also housed in the same small data center. In December 2019 the small data center housed 21 servers dedicated to various tasks including the billing of the three companies. All the employees at the Angolan company were always connected by SSL-VPN, to two redundant Fortigate firewall/routers. They had e-mail, VoIP, and chat servers based on Linux CentOS virtual machines. In Angola, they already had two large warehouses, each with a structured local network and their own server, all properly organized and productive. In total they had more than 50 PC's in Angola and more than 12 in the Portuguese counterpart.

During those ten years she never went to Angola. She carried out and guided everything from Portugal. Sometimes she was remotely connected, doing IT support, to a dozen or more PCs simultaneously. The tasks that she couldn't do by remote control (TeamViewer, AnyDesk, Remote Desktop), she taught others to do with help of  tutorials and/or conducted by phone/video conference (Viber, WhatsApp, etc.) to get the work done.

She created good working ties with everyone, she has dialogued with.