Leading companies that carried away this year's Thailand Corporate Excellence Awards shared their best practices and challenges at a seminar held by the Thailand Management Association during the award presentation ceremony last week. The Nation's Pichaya Changsorn was there.
Siam Cement Group swept up four of the eight Thailand Corporate Excellence Awards last week, in recognition of the group's achievements in human resource management, innovation, products and services and corporate social responsibility.
Its chief financial officer Roongrote Rangsiyopash said that SCG's underlying strength was its pool of competence; its professional and teamwork-oriented human resources. One of the group's major challenges is "transferring these capabilities" out of its home turf, as SCG is expanding aggressively overseas, he said.
"In general, it is difficult for a national company to work in other countries because the working environment, the market and competition, and the people-management conditions are all different. Therefore, a company which is good in one place sometimes cannot bring its domestic strengths to make it succeed in other location."
This issue, Roongrote said, often dominated discussion within SCG.
The group's approach is to adopt practices of good corporate citizenship in each of the countries in which it operates, making the local staff feel that they own the company they're working for, and avoiding the impression that the Thai staff are the owners.
"It is similar to when people visit our home: we must give them a warmer welcome than the people who live there. [We] must be a company with no nationality," he said.
Roongrote said SCG was halfway towards it goals of becoming "Asean's sustainable business leader" and an "innovative workplace of choice" by the year 2015. It is confident of achieving both goals. Its research and development budgets have been tripled over the past couple of years, but current annual R&D expenditure of Bt1 billion - representing 0.3 to 0.4 per cent of total sales - is still not reaching a "critical mass".
"It's still not reaching the point we would like to see. To achieve a critical scale, it has to be at least 1 per cent [of total sales]," he said.
SCG reported a net profit of Bt28 billion on sales of Bt250 billion last year.
PTT's chief financial officer Tevin Vongvanich said that as a partially-privatised company, the energy conglomerate had been striving to manage the expectations of, and balancing the benefits for, all of its stakeholders. Each of them has a different focus, whether it be profitability, national energy security or social responsibility, he said.
He was speaking as PTT received Thailand Corporate Excellence Awards in the categories of leadership and financial management.
Tevin, who is also chairman of the Thailand Management Association, said both "competencies and luck" had contributed to PTT's many achievements.
"We're lucky to be in a good industry. Our leaders have far-sighted visions and are able to create commitment [to execution] within the organisation. Our six leaders, from the past to present, have been able to carry on a consciousness of doing benefit for the country, while inspiring commitment from staff and attracting quality personnel," he said.
Furthermore, PTT has demonstrated its ability to capture opportunities during a downturn, including the global financial crisis two years ago, when it acquired some troubled companies, Tevin said.
Other winners of this year's Thailand Corporate Excellence Awards - chosen by an opinion survey among of local business managers - were True Corp in the marketing category and Charoen Pokphand Foods in the corporate-improvement category.
As well as the four winners, nine other firms were nominated for awards: Bangkok Bank, Kasikornbank, Siam Commercial Bank, CP Group, Toyota Motor Thailand, Thai Beverage, Total Access Communication, Bangchak Petroleum and Oishi Group.
Kasikornbank's executive vice president Somkiat Sirichatchai said that to meet its vision of becoming the "strongest, most innovative and most proactive Thai financial institution in serving customers", KBank had focused on building four capabilities:
-the capability to understand customer needs and insights. In achieving this, it has clearly segmented customers into seven major groups;
-the capability to innovate and manage products and services that serve the needs of customers;
-a sales and service capability covering all aspects of human resources, infrastructure and outlets, such as physical branches, mobile banking and ATMs, for the convenience of customers; and
-a risk management capability.
"We innovate and manage our products and services through asking customers," Somkiat said. "Having a '[customers'] feedback loop' is critically important in today's fast-changing world.
"We measure our customers in each segment, [and we calculate] how many per cent [are in each], what percentage of each customer's product holdings are in each of the seven product categories, what our market shares are, for what percentage [of customers] we are the main bank, and so on."
Somkiat said Kbank had a session to "massage" its executives every month to ensure that they kept serving and engaging their customers well. Chief executive Banthoon Lamsam always stresses at the monthly meetings that Kbank staff must be happy and remain passionate about their work.
"Khun Banthoon always says at every monthly meeting that he would like to see his staff wake up and come to work every day full of energy, and come to see other hospitable colleagues," he said.
Capitalising on its strength among small- and medium-sized enterprise customers in Thailand, Kbank has recently expanded to China through a partnership with a Chinese institution. In China, the SMEs segment is under-served.
"So far, so good," Somkiat said. "If this pilot programme turns out a clear result, we will expand further. We're doing 'launch and learn' at the same time."
Kbank was nominated for awards in many categories, including financial management, human resources, marketing, products and services and leadership.
Toyota Motor Thailand's general manager for product management Tawee Chairamreuk spoke of the auto-maker's focus on the needs of local customers.
In the past, the firm sold automobiles as they were designed and engineered in Japan. These days, it first surveys the requirements of local customers, sometimes even visiting their homes to see how they're using their vehicles.
As an example, Tawee said the chief engineer of Toyota went out to survey the Thai market by himself, and found that in the North there was a problem with automobiles having difficulty in climbing steep hills. He returned with design ideas. "Now, we're selling briskly in the North because our pickups can be driven up the hills comfortably," he said.
In addition to making good products, Toyota has also thrived on service, with 312 outlets around the country and its corporate social responsibility initiatives, including the use of solvent-free, water-borne paint and its energy-conserving, eco-friendly factories, service centres, and automobiles.
"Besides receiving benefits, our customers are proud that they are a part of Toyota, and we're taking care of the environment," Tawee said. "The future direction will be towards renewable energy, such as the Altis CNG, for which we have received very high booking orders, and eco-friendly vehicles such as hybrid cars. While the fuel consumption of eco-cars [as required by the government] is more than 20 kilometres a litre, the Prius [Toyota's hybrid model that is soon to be launched in Thailand] can go nearly 30 kilometres on a litre [of fuel]," he said.
Toyota was nominated for awards in the human resources, innovation, products and services, corporate social responsibility and leadership categories.