 In this topic, we are going to discuss a case study of repatriation and loss prevention at a company called ISCAM. Basically, this is a story of a person called Vane Balova who was serving as a loss prevention and safety director at ISCAM. ISCAM is a US based global mining engineering firm and Vane was sent on an international assignment as safety director in their mining business in Peru. He served there for three years and he has just recently returned after serving three years in Peru. Currently, he was repatriated back in Denver, the city of Denver, which is in America. This is a story about how he is feeling and what he is doing when he has been repatriated back to the home country. Today, which is the current situation, he has just resigned from his job in ISCAM and is going to start his own security firm. This is the context, this is the situation that he was a top level manager who was sent on an international assignment, served three years over there, came back and now after six months he resigned from the company and is planning to do his own business. Why did that happen? This is a story of repatriation and loss of the organization. So let's start from the expatriation process of Vane. The company did an excellent job of preparing the person and his family for the departure. So the pre-departure training was done very effectively. The children, they were admitted to American schools in Peru and they were very happy over there. His Mexican-born wife was also very much happy over there to be part of the local expatriate community as well as the church community. So for adjusting him there, the organization took very good steps and his family adjusted him very well three years ago when he moved to Peru on an international assignment. Vane himself was also very much happy because he was enjoying increased responsibility and centrality of his role. So when he did the international assignment, he was the center of attention. He had all the responsibility and he had the autonomy to make decisions and therefore he had more responsibility, more authority and he was more central in his role and he was enjoying all that. As an ex-army officer, he developed some counter-terrorism and security protocols and that was something which was really gratifying from him. He got a lot of sense of achievement from designing those counter-terrorism and security protocols to make sure that the organization's facilities and the mines in which they work, they were safe and protected and the employees were protected from threats of terrorism and other security problems. So he was also very happy but this was the process of expatriation. Now when he was repatriated back, what happened in that context? Repatriation back to America was a totally different thing. The organization has gone through one year after he left. The organization went through a major restructuring and the way things were done when he was there in U.S., the organization completely shifted to some new processes. Because of that restructuring, his mentor Herman Balking also resigned. The restructuring aftershocks relocated many close colleagues that he used to work with. Now because of that, what happened was that his liaison in the home country, it all vanished. His informal corporate intelligence network, it totally disappeared. Your informal network where you get to know people, which is very important to survive in any organization and to be successful. It all disappeared because most of his colleagues moved out of the state due to restructuring. Now his role with the liaison, it was passed to very junior staff who didn't know him. They didn't understand what he was talking about, nor his repertoire with him. So all this repatriation during these problems started to create when he was employed in the assignment. Now when he was repatriated back, when he actually returned back, the company's top management talked to him that the job we had thought for, that was nowhere to be found. And actually what happened was that on the return, he actually had to spend a lot of time looking for and getting a real office in his organization and getting an assignment which had some position, some job description. He had to actually wait for that and spend a lot of time getting those things for his assignment. And everyone had a different perspective about how things had to be done, which was quite frustrating for him. And he felt claustrophobic. Claustrophobic is that when you get stuck in a place and you don't breathe, that is something which is claustrophobic. This is something that he said that I feel claustrophobic because I can't breathe here. The protocols he developed with so much effort and he used to feel pride in that, those protocols were changed or were systematically ignored. So in such a situation, he felt very much diminished and his self-esteem was also heard that the protocols that he had developed, they were actually ignored. Now on the home front, he was also facing a lot of problems. The house that he bought was very expensive. When he was leaving, the HR had suggested that the house that he owns in America at that time, he should sell it. And now when he has come back, he had to purchase a house at a very high price, which was a real burden on him. It was in an area in which the government schools were not very satisfactory. So his kids were also having problems. He looked for private schools, but the private schools were very expensive. And his wife had also started complaining about the very cold weather of Denver because Peru is a moderate climate area and Denver is in a colder temperature zone. So his wife was also complaining. And that actually led to a talk with Balking, which was his mentor, that what should we do? So Balking, who had already resigned, he said that, well, maybe it's time to leave the company and because you have the professional expertise and I have a lot of context, so let's get together and start our own business. And so therefore, because of a poor management of this repatriation process, the company, just after six months of repatriation of Wayne, they had to lose him. He resigned and the company had to lose his professional expertise and experience. So this is the real story of a person who was actually very effectively expatriated, but very poorly repatriated back to the home country and therefore the organization had to face the loss of losing him.