The Principals

Janaki (Jan) Ramachandran, MBA (Aust), ACIM (Lond), FCIS (Aust)
Managing Director

Janaki Ramachandran founded Facilitrade in September 2000. She has extensive and proven experience in business capability improvement and transformational change management, trade facilitation and international marketing.

She started her career as a Company Secretary in Sri Lanka and qualified as an Associate of the Institute of Chartered Secretaries and Administrators, London. Her experience in consulting to business was first gained when Janaki worked with SGV Management Consultants (1981-1983) and assisted with setting up foreign companies in Sri Lanka during an influx of foreign investment in Asia.

She migrated to Australia in 1983 and until 1992 held senior management positions across various Australian industries. During this period she was conferred with Associate Corporate Institute of Managers and commenced post-graduate studies graduating with an MBA from Macquarie University, Sydney specialising in Marketing and International Finance. In 1992 she joined Austrade and had a diverse career of eight years in the trade development arena. From an Assessor for Export Market Development Grants she was then Market Research Manager, Market Research Quality Assurance Officer and Manager Performance Measurement in the Corporate Strategy area of Austrade.

As Managing Partner of Facilitrade Janaki has developed successful overseas market entry strategies for several Australian companies, sourced Australian suppliers for overseas Tenders and liaised with Australian state and federal government departments to provide grants and other financial assistance to exporters. She worked very closely with over 300 Australian organisations to help them position their products successfully in overseas markets and to improve their marketing capabilities.

Janaki consulted to American Express in Sydney for two years and developed and drove a commodity based marketing strategy for the Corporate Card Division for the Japan, Asia Pacific and Australian Region to enhance its sales capabilities. This resulted in over $10 Million per annum worth of new billing opportunities within the first six months. Implementation included training sales staff across the Region.

Recently Janaki managed the Performance Data Improvement Project for the Respite Directorate of NSW Dept of Ageing Disability and Home Care and within a short space of 9 months achieved outstanding results on several fronts: she carried out a data remediation program, educated and convinced service providers and staff across metropolitan and regional NSW of the importance of recording service usage data, prepared specifications for related IT systems improvement and developed performance measures by collaborating with business stakeholders, end users and IT specialists. In the first quarter after the completion of the project, data reporting improved by 35% and the completeness of data increased by 21%.

In the current recessionary economic climate in 2009 the company realises that businesses are best placed to focus on improving business processes and efficiencies and reduce slack. Based on this thinking Facilitrade now focuses on offering a suite of services that include business capability improvement and performance evaluation.

Rama Ramachandran, FCPA (Aust), ACMA (Lond)
Finance Director

Rama excels with twenty five years of experience in Cost and Management Accounting gained in Canada, England, Sri Lanka and Australia and across a variety of industries. Areas of expertise include implementing of fully automated ERP systems such as Oracle, J de Edwards and Baan; building costing systems such as Zero Base, Activity costing and Marginal costing; establishing recovery rates by work centers or profit centers; building manufacturing budgets; establishing costing policies and procedures; developing stock control procedures and critically analysing cost variances and the determination of the Break-Even point. Industry experience includes pharmaceuticals, timber, textiles, paper, cosmetics, food processing, automobile and aviation industries.

He is extremely skilled in assessing factory production processes and achieving cost efficiencies and considers this an integral part of every assigment he undertakes. His winning ways and people skills have enabled his success in large projects across the functional divides of organisations.

Dudeepa Ratwatte, BA (Hons) Econ (Lond)
Associate

Dudes as he is fondly known, is the youngest member of the team. He has to his credit fourteen years of experience as an extremely skilled Treasury Management specialist. Efficiencies include Treasury Sales, Asset and Liability Management, Market Risk Management and Financial Modeling and Analysis. He brings his sporting prowess into his work environment as a dynamic team leader and coach with keen negotiating and stakeholder management skills. Dudeepa possesses thorough knowledge of financial markets in Australia, England, Singapore and Sri Lanka and has also worked as a Risk Management Consultant for the Asian Development Bank.

Our Strengths:

Proven track record of business improvements across a wide spectrum of Australian organisations.
Established contacts in an international trade promotion network.
Intricate Knowledge to position an organisation to win business overseas.
Key government and industry contacts.
In-depth financial market and management accounting expertise.
Personal attention.