Meet Southeast Asia's game changers at SBR's Asian Business Case Studies Awards

Use cases saw a telco working on Singapore’s Night Festival as well as Thailand’s leading procurement specialist.

This year’s awards did not fail to deliver a fresh new batch of solutions that should certainly be on every company’s wishlist as enterprises re-evaluate and forge partner ecosystems to grapple with the health and economic crisis.

Singapore Business Review once again hailed extraordinary companies and their noteworthy solutions at the fifth edition of the Asian Business Case Studies Awards, which was held in a webinar format on the 1st of July, as the Lion City and the rest of its peers softly reopen their economies

The first award went to CrimsonLogic subsidiary and Singapore-headquartered Global eTrade Services (GeTS Asia Pte Ltd) who banked on its deep domain knowledge in the logistics trade to answer the pain point for payments startup Thunes. GeTS Asia helped Thunes build a vibrant ecosystem made up of shippers, freight forwarders, as well as financial institutions through CALISTA^TM. Complementing this of course is CALISTA^TM Insights—a middleware solution created to harness intelligence and data for the logistics and financial industry.

Thunes, French slang for money, partnered with GeTS to process a little over US$6 billion of transactions to date, and now operates in over 80 economies around the world covering over 60 currencies. GeTS is looking to further leverage upon Thunes’ cross-border capabilities to meet its ever evolving logistics use case.

Thailand’s Pantavanij, meanwhile, delivered on its procurement capabilities as companies try to reduce business costs and source elsewhere. Founded in 2001 and with 12 markets across South Asia, Pantavanij developed one of Asia’s best electronic procurement (eProcurement) and online auction (eAuction) platforms to ease the supply chain for the largest companies in telecommunication, banking and insurance, retail and distribution, energy, manufacturing, and education.

This is what a 19-year partner in the telecom sector said about Pantavaniij, “Out of the total corporate procurement spending of US$2.7b, we spent approximately US$2.2b in 2019 through Pantavanij’s platform.”

Pantavani’s eProcurement platform already adopts RPA for procurement, as well as best practices for eAuction preparation and negotiation, along with artificial intelligence, to procure commodity products at the right volume and quantity, and with the right supplier at the right time.

Boosting its ASEAN presence, Pantavanij has recently opened a new facility in Ho Chi Minh City, as a testbed to leverage its expertise and deliver its tried-and-tested eProcurement and eAuction platforms to a new market, particularly in Vietnam where clients share similar procurement challenges with Pantavanij’s existing Thai clientele.

Rounding out the top solutions was none other than StarHub, who listened in and touched on the grassroots cultural fair Singapore Night Festival (SNF) to provide geomobility analytics capabilities for the National Heritage Board, as they identified interests, preferences and activity through all the sound and noise.

With its data analytics solution, the 2019 edition of the Festival reached out to over 400,000 visitors who attended the festival over 600,000 times, educating NHB with a more holistic understanding of its festival audience. “For instance, geomobility data has shown that the MRT stations surrounding the festival grounds are potentially a key catchment area for new audiences,” noted Deputy Director for Festivals and Precinct Development, David Chew, in a statement.

Recruitment agency Hays Singapore says that the telecom industry is seeing increased hiring demand across the board, in the areas of engineering, marketing, IoT, analytics and cloud technology, as the pandemic proves the sector critical in enabling businesses and individuals to stay connected.

The winning innovators present their remarkable case studies here:

• Easing payment transactions with real-time insights
• Providing eProcurement to boost profits and efficiency for Asia’s largest firms
• Tech meets art with StarHub’s groundbreaking telco analytics

If you would like to join the next round of awards and be recognised as one of the most outstanding business solution providers in Asia, please email Jane at jane@charltonmediamail.com