In a move to decentralise its operations the Jamaica Public Service Company, JPS, has announced the appointment of
JAMAICA Public Service Company’s President & Chief Executive, Kelly Tomblin, has announced the appointment of 15 new parish managers as part of her efforts to transform the light and power company into a more customer-centred organisation.
The parish manager appointments form part of a comprehensive organisational restructuring currently in progress at JPS.
“We are changing the way we serve our customers,” Tomblin said in a statement issued by the island’s major electricity provider yesterday.
“We are decentralising our operations, so that decisions about serving our customers in the parishes no longer need to be made at the head office. Our aim is to create a more personal connection with our customers, so we are strengthening our service delivery capabilities at the local level.”
In this regard, JPS has also appointed three new directors who will have oversight for its regional operations. Omar Sweeney, who was most recently at the Planning Institute of Jamaica, will be responsible for JPS’ Eastern region; Keith Garvey, previously general manager of the Rural Electrification Programme (REP), is JPS’s new director of Region South; and Blaine Jarrett, previously director of transmission services at JPS, will now head the company’s Western operations.
In addition to two of its new regional directors, almost half of the newly appointed parish managers are from outside of the company.
“The recruitment of business executives and professionals from outside the organisation is the first phase of our organisational transformation,” Tomblin said.
“We are excited about the new direction that JPS is taking, and the value and new perspectives that these new executives will bring. Our customers will definitely be seeing and feeling the new JPS before long,” she said.
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IT was not an easy decision for Kelly Tomblin, taking the helm of the Jamaica Public Service (JPS). In fact, the United States native harboured strong reservations about relocating to Jamaica.
But it wasn’t a fear of the country and its high crime stats that spawned Tomblin’s concern.
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TOMBLIN… I bring a different perspective to a problem (Photo: Naphtali Junior) |
“I am typically sent somewhere when there is something wrong with a company in the group,” Tomblin told All Woman in a recent interview. “I’m usually called when there is a growth problem.”
It was a difficult decision, too, because Tomblin, a mother of two, never lived for any prolonged time outside the US. “I have never lived internationally, no more than six months,” she said, but indicates that she is never one to resist a challenge.
The JPS appointed Tomblin, who has more than 20 years experience delivering energy in the US, just over a month ago to replace Damian Obiglio as CEO.
And so far, according to Tomblin, she is up to the task.
“If I didn’t believe it was possible I would hightail it out of here,” she declared. “I’ve been a woman in a male-dominated industry for a long time… I bring a different perspective to a problem.”
Tomblin has taken over an embattled JPS facing widespread flak for its high electricity charges and an underlying feeling that the monopoly is raking in profits without concern for its customers, including a predatory disconnection policy.
“Before I took the job I knew the issues on some level through articles I read in the press overseas,” she said. However, since coming to Jamaica, Tomblin said she has spent the last 30 days asking questions and listening.
“It’s not until I got here and started meeting with the stakeholders, regulators, customers and most significantly, our employees that I got the gravity of the issues we are facing,” she admitted. “During that time my overall focus was on listening… I did not know the intensity of emotion against the JPS.”
Tomblin’s initial apprehension about her JPS troubleshooting job was slowly being justified, leaving her to comment that she has never seen an electricity company facing such difficult and complex set of challenges.
But despite being taken somewhat by surprise, interacting with Jamaicans is not new to the Texan who revealed that she first visited the island some 15 years ago on vacation, and has returned on cruise ships a few times after. She recalls her first trip as a “pleasant experience”.
“It was just before the birth of my first child,” she shared.
Leaving the confines and protection of a Montego Bay all-inclusive hotel, Tomblin and her husband used public transportation to move around the island “getting to know the people”.
“We took a cab to James Bond Beach (St Mary) and spent almost the entire day,” she said. “[There was ] even teaching a young child how to swim.”
At that time Tomblin hadn’t the slightest inkling that she would have returned to Jamaica as a resident and would have lost her anonymity in the hot seat as boss of a troubled JPS.
“When we were here then we could move around and not be identified, now everywhere I go they say ‘that’s the JPS lady’,” Tomblin remarked. “People feel they know me and will talk to me. The impression of JPS is not positive but the good thing is that they talk to me,” she reflected.
At her appointment JPS described Tomblin as having “extensive industry knowledge, strong business strategy and operations experience, as well as customer service expertise”, which will be to the benefit of all its stakeholders.
And given her expressed, strong leaning to customer service and experience as a troubleshooter, Tomblin was clear about what she wants for the JPS.
“You can teach people engineering… but you can’t teach people how to build trust, how to be intimate with stakeholders, we are focusing a lot on that on that right now — being impeccable with your word.”
Tomblin said with passion that when she saw the JPS mission statement in the company’s head office she hoped they were not mere words.
“I have taken some steps not to place words on the wall and not mean it,” she quipped.
“You see so many people wanting the same thing, I see one factor where we can all get together,” she said of her new task.
To that end the JPS chief says she is establishing focus groups to find out “how we (JPS) got to this position”. She admits though that the loss of customer confidence in the JPS has posed a major problem but feels everybody genuinely wants JPS to be successful.
“When you’ve lost faith in something it’s hard to get it back,” she commented.
“You see a situation, so many people have the same target but approaching it in a piecemeal way,” she added.
How long Tomblin stays in Jamaica is totally up to shareholders in her company, she said, adding that her contract ends in two years.
Before her JPS appointment, Tomblin, who holds a Master of Business Administration from New York University, was regional vice-president of GDF SUEZ Energy Resources, with responsibility for leading the company’s market, competitive and regulatory strategy in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey, Delaware and Washington, DC.
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If the Jamaican government wants to break the monopoly on electricity distribution, the best way to do it is to buy out the majority owners of Jamaica Public Service Company Limited (JPS), the utility’s new CEO said Tuesday.
Concurrently, the power utility announced preliminary plans to build a US$475-million 100-megawatt petcoke fuel plant as the second phase of its liquefied natural gas (LNG) project. These projects fall under its five-year US$1.5-billion capital expenditure programme.
Liberalisation without a buy-out would send negative signals to foreign investors, JPS CEO Kelly Tomblin said in a speech to a Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) meeting in New Kingston.
JPS is owned 40 per cent by Marubeni Corporation, 40 per cent by Korea East-West Power and 19.9 per cent by the Government of Jamaica. The other 0.1 per cent is held by individuals.
“Basically, the government can buy it back from us and then they can liberalise it, and we are certainly open to that. We do not want to stand in the way,” Tomblin said.
JPS’s current exclusive licence has another 16-year run to 2027.
Tomblin’s comments are in response to energy minister Phillip Paulwell’s stated policy goal of liberalising the distribution of power to customers. Paulwell has not said how he plans to execute the strategy.
Currently, some 30 per cent of Jamaica’s 820-megawatt capacity comes from independent power producers which compete to set up generation units to sell power to JPS. They, however, cannot sell power directly to customers and Tomblin advised Government to avoid breaching the JPS contract.
“I do think it would signal a lack of contract certainty and a lack of regulatory certainty,” she told the JCC. “And as the minister, I wouldn’t want to signal that to the international community.”
Higher electricity bills
The cash-strapped Government has little capacity to buy out Marubeni and East-West Power’s stake in JPS.
The utility is one of the largest companies in Jamaica, with total assets valuing US$1.05 billion (J$91 billion). JPS had a net worth of US$371 million (J$32 billion) as at December 2011.
Government wants to liberalise the sector to reduce the cost of electricity to consumers and businesses, but Tomblin argued that it would lead, instead, to higher power bills.
“It is so counter to what I have experienced in the US markets. We used to be small utilities broken down, and we found no economies of scale with workers, with systems or with technology. Then we saw those smaller distribution companies getting larger economies of scale by coming together and getting bigger and bigger,” she said.
Joint undertaking
It was not immediately clear whether the petcoke plant is a redraft of a project announced four years ago as a joint undertaking of JPS and state-owned oil refinery Petrojam Limited. That project was billed as a US$300-million investment to be finalised in 2012, but it never got off the ground.
The new US$475-million petcoke plant will be pursued after JPS finalises the US$614-million LNG plant.
“We believe it makes good sense in the second phase of the project,” Tomblin said.
The company will also spend US$143 million on upgrading its transmission and distribution lines; US$89 million to reduce system losses, including power theft; and US$73 million on renewables.
http://jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20120516/business/business1.html
JUST over one week ago, new Jamaica Public Service CEO Mrs Kelly Tomblin, having spent just over a month listening to the various stakeholders in JPS, particularly its customers and employees, revealed to the Observer Monday Exchange that she had never seen an electricity company facing such a difficult and complex set of challenges.
This was despite the fact that in her group she is normally brought in to deal with difficult situations requiring some form of turnaround. Indeed, many years ago, her first job in the electricity industry was at the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant in the United States, the scene of a near meltdown, and now part of the literature on how not to handle a crisis.
Mrs Tomblin was, of course, saying no more than the truth. In addition to facing legal challenges concerning some of its practices, such as back-billing, and its licence (the latter reflecting the overall legal and regulatory risk the company is facing), JPS has lost the trust of its customers, and even, Mrs Tomblin suggested, its employees.
One example of the former is that a group of Jamaica’s largest, most influential, progressive and innovative companies came together to publicly demand electricity competition. More generally, every householder and business in Jamaica, both rich and small, awaits with trepidation the monthly arrival of their electricity bill, over which many feel they have no control. Even JPS shareholders are clearly not happy with the many changes of ownership in just over a decade.
Despite the view of the man in the street that JPS is rapacious, a US$34-million profit on US$1.2 billion in sales is not particularly high, and could even be described as inadequate, given routine capital expenditure of US$40 million to US$50 million, and particularly against the huge increase in investment required over the next few years.
On the positive side, JPS shareholders have, according to Mrs Tomblin, the long-term view required to make the new investments. The decision to move ahead with the new LNG-powered electricity plant means the long-delayed decision on Jamaica’s future fuel source appears to have finally been made.
When Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) was originally mooted as Jamaica’s preferred fuel source over coal, there were legitimate concerns over the paucity of suppliers, particularly without a guaranteed supply from our Caricom partner Trinidad. However, the huge increase in the production of shale gas has collapsed natural gas prices in the United States, which now appears poised to become a major world supplier of gas.
In Japan and South Korea, the respective home bases for the current owners of JPS, all natural gas supplied for electricity generation comes through their own LNG terminals, suggesting they will have readily transferable expertise available to Jamaica in this still emerging area.
The starting point to rebuilding trust in JPS will be for Mrs Tomblin to continue to listen to the emotional pain of her customers, and empower her front line employees, all of whom know very well what is going on.
Mrs Tomblin appears to understand that, when in pain, neither customers nor her employees will care about the needs of JPS until it is clear that the business cares about them. Her current posture of emphasising listening, observing and acknowledging, rather than trying to explain or rationalise, reflects a necessary emotional intelligence that appeared to be missing from former top management.
She is off to a good start.
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EW Jamaica Public Service (JPS) head Kelly Tomblin is coming under attack for statements which are now being described as “appalling” and reflective of the “continued arrogance” of the light and power company.
Citizens United for the Reduction of Electricity (CURE)