Radar Remote Sensing Group
Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Cape Town
Private Bag X3
Rondebosch 7701
South Africa
Telephone: +27 (0)21 - 650 2799
Fax-to-Email: 086 616 7400
Email: regine.lorduct.ac.za
My responsibilities include the usual secretarial stuff - answering the telephone, taking messages, writing and replying to emails, keeping track of borrowed library items and keys, and sorting out all kinds of queries from students, industry partners, etc.
On the accounting side, I fill in various SAP R/3 documents (invoice requisitions, reimbursements, travel expenses, mileage claims, bursary forms, ad hoc payments to students, etc.) and then check the information that actually appears in SAP. I keep a beady eye on the issuing, mailing and payment of invoices - no step along the way is without its potential and actual pitfalls, and the path is often a long and winding one with dead ends and much retracing of steps. As SAP is so user-unfriendly and does not generate nice-looking, colourful reports and charts, we enter all the information into our own accounting package, Quickbooks.
As part of my administrative duties, I organise and reschedule flights and car hire, and generally do a LOT of following up, reminding, nagging, cajoling, pleading, and sometimes throwing my toys out of the cot. I try to sort out all problems that arise - my most daunting and as yet unsolved one (since June of 2006!) being to track down an AWOL laptop, thanks to the incompetence and intransigence of the US Postal Services and their UK agents Parcel-Force (Parcel-Farce?) - and generally to anticipate and circumvent problems that are likely to arise.
I also enter references (MSc and PhD theses, journal articles, conference papers, slideshow presentations, technical reports, books, etc.) in the RRSG’s online bibliographic system (appropriately called REFS), and am working on a basic manual for the REFS system to help new students that join the Group.
Finally, I am responsible for updating the Group’s main website