You get further with a carrot and a big stick … Criticism is often painful to receive, but when it is well informed and constructive, it can be a helpful if difficult pill to swallow. The case for ill-informed criticism is harder to make, and there has been a lot of it about lately with regard to the ACMA, so we thought we would take this opportunity to clear up any confusion there may be. For those readers of SubTel Forum that are not already aware, the ACMA is the Atlantic Cable Maintenance and Repair Agreement. It is the preeminent provider of submarine maintenance services in the Atlantic Ocean. The ACMA is a non-profit making collaborative venture among almost 50 of the Atlantic’s cable owners, providing the same level of service to cables ranging from Cable & Wireless’ state of the art Apollo trans-Atlantic ring system, to cables such as APOCS in Canada and Unisur between Uruguay and Argentina. The pricing arrangement for all of these cables is exactly the same, meaning that the ACMA is open and fair to all. This has been recognised by the EU competition commission, who have approved the ACMA arrangements on more than one occasion, citing the special and direct benefits of the ACMA to European consumers.
In the November 2003 issue of SubTel Forum someone called John Pockett stated “This seems particularly relevant to your readers when large organisations such as ACMA seem to be moving towards just penalising suppliers for failure, instead of running a balanced scorecard, which can reward or penalise in direct relationship to the way in which they improve or worsen the fortunes of their customers”. Let’s put to one side that Mr Pockett has not been to any ACMA meetings for at least eight years to our knowledge, so we’re not sure how he knows in which direction ACMA is moving, and examine the substance of what he is claiming. Is ACMA “just penalising suppliers for failure”? It may interest your readers to know that so far, only one supplier has been “penalised” by ACMA, meaning that our other suppliers haven’t been. That is because only one supplier has failed, which would in turn imply that suppliers do have the ability to succeed. If you succeed, you get paid according to the contract you signed, which seems pretty balanced to us. It may further interest your readers to know that the measures ACMA is using to benchmark its
by Rogan Hollis suppliers were all negotiated and agreed with those suppliers – not imposed by us. In fact, many of the cable owners – also known as “customers” in this context – were disappointed not to achieve more stretching targets in their supply contract. It is usually a sign of a fair and balanced contract that both sides feel they haven’t gotten everything they wanted. Even more interestingly, when ACMA 2004 was being negotiated, the new service providers were given an opportunity to re-visit some of the measures that the ACMA is using. Those service providers declined to change them, which would suggest that they consider them to be achievable - or at least that they consider the “penalties” for not achieving them to be fair and to reflect the impact that failure has on the cable owners. Let’s not forget that restoration on another cable can cost millions of dollars, so the penalties that we are
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