IDC: Standard Chartered is Future Enterprise of Year for Malaysia, TM’s Umapathy Sivan, Named CIO of Year

• Petronas connectivity project named Best in Future of Connectedness
• DHL’s processing via whatsapp is Best in Future of Customers & Consumers

IDC Malaysia announced at its Digital Transformation (DX) Summit Malaysia, last week, that Standard Chartered Bank is the Future Enterprise of the Year for Malaysia while M. Umapathy Sivan of Telekom Malaysia Bhd (TM) was recognized as CIO/CDO of the Year.

Now on its fifth year, IDC’s Future Enterprise Awards celebrates the tech-enabled resilience of enterprises as they navigate through the challenges and disruptions of the digital economy in the changed world. Joining Standard Chartered Bank and TM as Malaysia winners are: Petronas, DHL Express Malaysia, AIA Group, Tricor Group, Payments Network Malaysia (PayNet), and BAT.

These organizations asserted their leadership amid a pandemic and distinguished themselves from more than 1,000 entries received from close to 700 end-user organizations across Asia/Pacific.

“ASEAN organizations have transitioned through multiple phases of accelerated digital transformation initiatives over the past 12 months. The award winners this year are testimony of the belief in technology to help them through difficult times, and we are seeing the shift in organizations being targeted in their technology expenditure. The Future Enterprise beckons – and as all ASEAN economies prioritise the need for a Digital Economy – the importance for organizations to adopt technology to stave off future disruption becomes critical,” said Sudev Bangah (pic), Managing Director at IDC ASEAN.

This year’s Future Enterprise benchmarks were chosen based on their successful implementation of digital initiatives that address new customer requirements, development of new capabilities, deployment of new critical infrastructure, and pursuit of new industry ecosystems.

The following are this year’s Future Enterprise Awards categories and winners, featuring nine new digital agenda items:

• Connecting the Unconnected by Petronas named as Best in Future of Connectedness

As Petronas embarked on a digital transformation journey, the importance of having the right modern connectivity globally across all its offices and sites (e.g., plants, offshore platforms, petrol stations) for insights, productivity, and safety became clear. A holistic master plan was executed, which includes revamping the global corporate network to SDWAN technology, bringing direct internet access to all identified sites, connecting process areas (onshore and offshore) with pervasive wireless technologies.

The SDWAN backbone has enabled them to manage a global network efficiently and reduce operating cost by 20% through single centralized control. The secured Pervasive Wireless technology introduced at plants and offshore platforms, that used to have minimal connectivity, has enabled its people to be connected securely indoor/outdoor. These initiatives, that span across multiple major sites across Malaysia, have delivered significant improvements in productivity and safety of their people.

• Revolutionary Way for Shipment Processing Using WhatsApp by DHL Express Malaysia named as Best in Future of Customers and Consumers

In Malaysia, a large percentage of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) fall within the micro segment. Acknowledging it has not been able to offer a proper approach to support this customer segment, DHL has created a detailed vision of how it interacts and engages with SMEs at every stage of their journey. To enable and empower their staff to understand their customers' pain points and to cultivate a mindset of “customer first," DHL embarked on exploring a platform which aimed to improve the shipping experience of its smaller and ad-hoc shippers typically falling between the Retail and Multi-Channel segments.

Using the WhatsApp platform, DHL has developed shipment processing capabilities which are accessible to their micro SME (MSMS) customers as part of its Support Strategy 2025 of "delivering excellence in a digital world." By identifying pain points and actions to address them, DHL accelerated the acquisition of untapped MSMEs, generated more leads, achieved higher data integrity, automated invoice creation capability, and improved customer retention rates.

• Tricor’s Digital Transformation Journey to Improve Client Experience saw Tricor Group named as Best in Future of Digital Infrastructure

In 2019, Tricor embarked on a company-wide digital transformation strategy to address operational pain points, deliver superior solutions, and craft personalized client experiences. Robotic Process Automation (RPA), which has completely revolutionized the client experience and backend processing, underpinned Tricor’s digital transformation journey well before Covid-19 triggered a massive shift to digitalization and virtualization. Tricor’s digital strategy helped the firm rapidly implementing new technology to better develop products and solutions that meet evolving, growing marketplace needs.

Early in its digital transformation journey, Tricor established a Shared Services Center in Kuala Lumpur (Tricor ace) and Centre of Excellence to introduce technology to core business lines. The Shared Service Center allows clients to focus on core activities that grow their businesses, while Tricor takes care of the rest through its center of excellence and highly skilled professional workforce.

• Project Boost by AIA Group named as Best in Future of Digital Innovation

AIA’s foundation of all modern transformations is upgrading to industry leading architecture and systems, so that strategic initiatives can be quickly scaled and drive greater efficiency, and to increase customer engagement and enhance their experience. Project Boost is an engaging digital health product that allows its members to manage and improve their dietary habits with real-time, AI-powered food scoring system.

The scoring system allows members to understand how healthy their food is by grading it from 1-5, with 1 being very unhealthy and five being the healthiest. They believe that this project will help many people across Asia choose their foods more wisely, enabling them to live Healthier, Longer, Better Lives. Since its launch in April, there have been 160,000 images submitted across three markets, demonstrating that its customers are beginning to adopt the new product.

• Real-Time Retail Payments Ecosystem Empowers Rapid Growth by Payments Network Malaysia Sdn Bhd named as Best in Future of Industry Ecosystems

With cashless payments seen as vital to the digitalization of the economy, the Real-Time Retail Payments Platform (RPP) was implemented to enable consumers and businesses to make and receive payments by instantly drawing funds from bank accounts or e-money accounts. With its payments solutions partner, PayNet built its real-time payments infrastructure, achieving this with a market-leading, best-practice approach. Through this platform, PayNet successfully onboarded most of the market participants and launched new services in less than a year.

PayNet built RPP using a Low Value Real-Time Payments solution, which includes the following components: Central Infrastructure Hub (RPP Hub) and Central Infrastructure Connectors/Gateways that allow banks and non-banks direct access to RPP (RPP Connectors/Gateways). RPP achieved its 1 billionth transaction in under 22 months after its launch, and with additional payment services on the road map will continue to drive massive growth, with a forecast of more than 350 to 400 million transactions per month predicted in 2024.

• Building A Better Tomorrow TM with DevOps and Data and Analytics by BAT named as Best in Future of Intelligence

One of BAT’s strategic priorities of this project was the effective and powerful utilization of data and analytics (D&A). In just a few months, BAT designed, built, and enabled a world-class, agile, modern, reliable, secure, and compliant D&A platform. Now live in more than 50 markets, this global roll-out across the BAT Group has been driven by a small team located in its Kuala Lumpur Hub.

Digital and DevOps are the backbone of this enterprise program. To respond more quickly to end-market requirements, BAT has established a decentralized DevOps unit (with a headcount of 20), focusing on rapid, iterative delivery through cross-team collaboration. To achieve speed and global scale, BAT has developed automation and observability across the landscape. Most importantly, they have worked on forging a new culture, with a “build fast, fail fast, learn fast” mindset. Based on this successful transformation in D&A, BAT is now replicating the shift in other parts of the organization.

• M. Umapathy Sivan of Telekom Malaysia Bhd named as CIO/CDO of the Year

Telekom Malaysia places an emphasis on delivering an enhanced customer experience via continuous customer service quality improvements and innovations, whilst focusing on increased operational efficiency and productivity. M. Umapathy Sivan was appointed as CIO in August 2019, and since his appointment, tremendous change and improvement can be seen in how IT and Digital is managed in the company.

IT has undergone internal transformation programs to grow into a technology enabler and data driven service delivery organization which offers services to internal groups as well as external organization. Under his leadership, multiple strategic projects are created to create values and new capabilities in the organization. In facing the new normal, Sivan has paved the way for connected digital ecosystems through STELLAR (BSS transformation), ERP transformation, and Digital Workplace which has helped the organization to adapt to business changes, enabled by the DevOps concepts and an Agile framework.

• Covid-19 Response by Standard Chartered Bank named as Special Award for Digital Resiliency

To keep the bank employees' working productivity during the pandemic, Standard Chartered Bank launched the Covid-19 technology taskforce. At the beginning of the pandemic, many employees who worked in operational roles did not have access to laptops or tooling they needed to work remotely. This taskforce was set up to identify potential issues quickly and accelerate digital solutions delivery to limit impact. This allowed many gaps to be addressed before employees in some countries even felt the impact of the pandemic on their working lives.

The taskforce focused on the technology teams’ time and energy on urgent activities required to support remote working and working from home (WFH) and ensure its employees were able to maintain services to its customers. It also drove the efforts and collaboration of 300+ employees in technology across all countries within the bank’s footprint. The benefits were felt by the entire Standard Chartered Bank with 100,000 employees and consultants in 60 markets, serving customers in close to 150 markets worldwide.

• Digital Workplace Transformation by Standard Chartered Bank named as Future Enterprise of the Year

Standard Chartered Bank's network serves customers in close to 150 markets worldwide. The Digital Workplace transformation journey is a multi-year initiative which was kicked off in January 2020. It is aimed at delivering modern, frictionless, and secure capabilities to their employees to enable greater mobility, productivity, and collaboration from any place, anytime and anyhow.

As it began its journey, the sudden impact of Covid-19 led to the need for mass remote working and the power of connectedness urgently became of paramount importance. To cater to its global remote workforce and to meet a wide range of customer needs, Standard Chartered Bank accelerated its long-term plans and transformed the workplace in a very short span of time. As a result of such transformation activities and customer experience surveys, today, more than 86,000 of its employees continue to connect and collaborate seamlessly with one another and serve its customers with minimal disruption.

 “The momentum of Digital acceleration from 2020 continued through to 2021. Organizations across Malaysia intensified their digital transformation effort to remain competitive in the digital economy while also reinforcing their organizations digital resiliency. With an emphasis on customer satisfaction, cost savings and operational efficiency, the nominations received for the Future Enterprise awards in Malaysia is a testament of Malaysian organization embracing and advancing in their DX journey,” said Duncan Tan, Senior Research Malaysia at IDC ASEAN.

IDC’s Future Enterprise Awards follows a two-phased approach to determine country and regional winners. Each nomination is evaluated by a team of local and regional IDC analysts against a standard assessment framework based on IDC’s Future Enterprise taxonomy. All country winners will qualify for the regional competition to be decided by a panel of judges comprised of IDC analysts, industry practitioners, thought leaders, and academia around the globe.

The 2021 Future Enterprise Awards Malaysia winners will compete at the regional finals happening at the IDC Digital Transformation (DX) Summit and Future Enterprise Awards which will be a hybrid event with regional winners announced on October 27-28, 2021.  For more information on IDC DX Awards, please visit www.idcdxawards.com.