IDC names the 10 digital transformation initiatives in Asia/Pacific as best of the best

• Chosen for their DX initiatives, which displayed mastery in at least one DX dimension
• Exhibit strong capabilities and creative use of technologies to thrive in the DX economy

IDC Asia/Pacific announced on Nov 28 the winners of the first regional IDC Digital Transformation Awards (DXa) 2017 at the Asia/Pacific DX Summit held at Flower Field Hall, Gardens by the Bay in Singapore.

Ten DX initiatives across Asia/Pacific were hailed as the best of the best, with Singapore’s Changi Airport Group and Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation named Digital Transformers of the Year.

Other winners include China’s Chunyu Doctor, Postal Savings Bank of China, Taiwan’s Taishin Bank, Hong Kong’s Jardine Restaurant Group, India’s HDFC Bank, Singapore’s M Social Hotel and Urban Redevelopment Authority.

All were chosen on the basis of their DX initiatives, which displayed great mastery in at least one DX dimension.

“As digital transformation becomes the new oxygen for Asia Pacific organisations, it’s fitting to recognise those who have not only paved the way towards change, but also made the leap to transform how their businesses and people operate.

“The inaugural winners of IDC’s DX awards exhibit strong capabilities and creative use of technologies to thrive in the DX economy,” says Daniel Zoe Jimenez, research director for Digital Transformation Practice, IDC Asia/Pacific.

The winning entries of the 2017 IDC DX Awardees are:

Changi Airport Group (CAG) is named Asia Pacific Digital Transformer of the Year

Changi Airport Group's Digital Master Plan (DMP) is a business transformation programme for the airport that has transformed Changi's passenger experience and laid the foundation for Changi to be a Smart Airport of the future.

The DMP helped Changi create a unified digital identity and presence by communicating to its passengers through streamlined, omni-channel content delivery and providing a revamped Changi mobile experience.

MTR Corporation from Hong Kong also named Asia Pacific Digital Transformer of the Year

MTR’s Digitalisation Roadmap for Rail Gen 2.0 leverages on disruptive digital technologies and strategically integrates them into their established business processes in order to be able to proactively enhance Hong Kong’s railway transportation service and meet the shifting customer needs.

MTR established an IT Centre of Excellence (iCoE) to promote and drive continuous digital transformation across business functions through the promotion and sharing of successful technology cases that are transforming the business.

China’s Chunyu Doctor named Asia Pacific Digital Disruptor of the Year for its Open Platform for Online Medical Consultation

Chunyu Doctor is the first online medical consultation platform in China that provides real-time communication between doctors and patients.

It brings convenient, accurate, and economical medical services to 125 million users, while bringing economic benefits and better brand recognition to 500,000 registered doctors.

DBS Bank named Asia Pacific DX Leader for L3D Mastery

Digitalisation is a key part of DBS's strategy to thrive in the digital economy where productivity, scalability, and agility are the key characteristics of a successful organisation.

With DBS’s 49-year history and 24,000 employees in the highly-regulated banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) industry, DBS considered cultural and organisational changes brought about by this strategy.

Taishin Bank (Taiwan) named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Information Visionary for its Comprehensive Customer Portrait Database

Taishin Bank's CRM department developed and established a Comprehensive Customer Portrait Database (CCPD), allowing customer characteristics, customer behaviour, and the relationships between the two to be viewed at the single customer, customer segment, and branch levels.

The CCPD allows marketers and managers to formulate strategies more rapidly, making it an effective data analysis solution.

Jardine Restaurant Group (Hong Kong) named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Information Visionary for its Pizza Hut Social CRM and Mobile App

Pizza Hut Social CRM is an advance initiative that is designed to prepare the organisation for a dynamic form of engagement with customers, aimed towards promoting customer loyalty, driving sales and ultimately own a bigger slice of the market share.

Launched in June 2015, the social CRM platform with its new mobile app changed the customer behaviour from using a plastic card to using their smartphones as touch point.

In its first six weeks, the mobile app had over 150,000 downloads and the total company sales grew from 27% in 2014 to over 45% in August 2017.

HDFC Bank (India) named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Omni-Experience for its HDFC Omni-Experience Transformation Initiative

HDFC Bank's Digital Innovations unit has created an omni-experience initiative with three services: Missed Call Commerce, HDFC Bank OnChat, and HDFC Bank LITE App.

It leverages on traditional and digital forms of communication to drive an enhanced banking experience, while simultaneously enabling ‘non-digital’ consumers to transact and interact with the bank via mobile phones.

The HDFC Bank LITE App does not require an internet connection to be used as communication takes place over SMS or the Missed Call Banking Platform, providing access to customers in remote areas.

M Social Hotel (Singapore) named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Operational Transformation

To address the increasing labour shortage in Singapore’s hospitality industry, M Social Singapore, a subsidiary of Millennium and Copthrone International Limited (MCIL), has introduced Singapore’s first Front-of-House Autonomous Service Delivery Robot, or AURA.

In partnership with StarHub, an info-communications service provider in the hospitality industry, alongside the Singapore Productivity Centre, M Social’s AURA has been integrated with various subsystems in the hotel, such as networks, elevators, and telephony.

Project AURA has enabled organisational excellence by making business operations more productive, as it addresses manpower shortage through robotics solutions.

Postal Savings Bank of China named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Operational Transformation for its Blockchain-hosted Business System

It is the first successful application of blockchain technology in a core banking business system in China’s banking industry.

Through innovation, research, and development based on the enterprise-class open source blockchain platform Hyperledger Fabric, Postal Savings Bank of China developed an asset-hosted blockchain system that includes four mechanisms: (1) shared ledger, (2) intelligent contract, (3) privacy protection and consensus mechanisms, and (4) realised interaction and sharing of hosted business information and supervision of asset usage.

Postal Savings Bank of China’s blockchain-based asset-hosted management system reduces original business links by about 60% to 80% and improves risk management.

Singapore’s Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) named Asia Pacific DX Leader for Talent Acceleration

URA has developed a three-year Digitalisation Plan to digitalise planning processes, using advanced digital technologies and big data analytics.

The plan facilitates integrated planning at the Whole-of-Government level, giving URA better planning insights and driving productivity gains.

The Digitalisation Plan uses six strategies including data digitization; data integration; systems integration; work process redesign; visualization and analytics; and modelling and simulation.

This includes building digital planning tools, collaboration platforms and analytics skill that transform planning processes.

The regional IDC DX Awards winners were selected through three rounds of panel judging and scoring on IDC’s DX MaturityScape Benchmark Assessment.

To enforce the highest level of transparency and impartiality in the evaluation process, each submission was reviewed and deliberated on by IDC Asia/Pacific senior executives.

“With over 250 submissions received this year, it’s thrilling to see this level of innovation from Asia Pacific and we look forward to seeing more DX success stories in the years to come,” ends Jimenez.

IDC expects the digital transformation (DX) spending across Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APeJ) organisations to reach US$412 Billion by 2018.