A Message on the 17th Anniversary

Today, the 17^th day of November, 2016, marks the 17^th Anniversary of my company, Softegic Systems Management Sdn Bhd, in business operations.

17 years ago, I did not really give much deliberation on business plan as taught in the business textbooks when I made such a profound decision in my career development pathway in 1999. I simply felt that I should do something at my very own ways to pursue the aspiration of propelling a better adoption and deployment of information systems for strategic value proposition in ever increasing competitive business environment. Hence, I registered a RM 2 company together with my late father, bought a PC, a desk, a chair, a printer, a fax machine, rented half of an office behind Pacific Mall in Butterworth, and started looking for software development business and delivered alone.

In retrospective, there are two major milestones that I must put on record.

First, in 2002 I came to a system deliverable dispute with a PLC in Bukit Tengah resulting the outstanding sum of payment worth RM180K not being paid. At the same period, a staff of mine whom I sent to Shanghai for a software development task had screwed up my project that worth RM100K. The incidents had seriously jeopardized the survival and business continuity of my company. With no other alternative, I was compelled to retrench all staffs and leave me alone for a period of three years. In 2004, I had managed to convince Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) to collaborate on a “Localized Balanced Scorecard” software R&D project via one of the grants from MOSTI where I submitted 3 research elements; (1) the KPI content together with leading-lagging relationship for selected strategies in Malaysian context, (2) the introduction of Regression Analysis to validate the KPIs relationships defined, (3) the introduction of constraints into the methodology of Balanced Scorecard via the application of Simplex Algorithm in optimization computation. The representatives of USM were Professor Dato’ Daing Nasir (present Vice Chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Pahang) and Professor Dato’ Yuserrie Zainuddin, (present Deputy Vice Chancellor of Universiti Malaysia Pahang) where the team of MOSTI grant panel assessors consists of 3 professors form UTM, 1 professor from UM and 1 professor form UPM, of which present Deputy Vice Chancellor of UTM, Professor Dr. Rose Alinda was one of them. Resulted from such collaboration, I was invited by Dr. TW Sam of USAINS (the commercial arm of USM) to setup operation office in the campus of USM, rightly next to the office of USAINS, in 2006. This series of development had undoubtedly lifted our strategic presence in market battlefield.

Second, from 2009 to 2011 I was engaged by MIMOS, Malaysia’s national ICT arm, as a consultant to one of its national projects on manufacturing-based supply chain solution. This engagement subsequently opened up doors for me to liaise with a number of government ministries and agencies for the sake of national interests. Such experiences have well served as an invaluable asset to further connecting with a few government bodies of the People’s Republic of China where I can contribute my know-hows and play a very small role in its world famous initiative known as Made in China 2025, a Chinese version of Industry 4.0 to propel smart manufacturing ecosystem transformation. This has undoubtedly reinforced our presence in the China’s market and thus gained eye-opening experiences in the-state-of-the-art technologies which hardly can find in Malaysia.

Be that as it may, 17 years of development journey is not short. I am not sure if I can have another 17 years, but what I can pretty sure is that, as far as I am still here, I shall continue doing the best although knowing that my personal capability is of tiny.

May I request the God to guide me continue to be courageous, persistent and tapping into opportunities come before me.