Sime Darby Berhad is one of the oldest and most successful multinational companies in Malaysia. With a twin focus on the Industrial and Motors sectors, the company employs more than 24,000 people, operating across 17 countries and territories. Sime Darby Motors’ Chief Digital & Information Officer Tuan Jean Tee shares how he makes sure digital, cultural, and process transformation go hand in hand throughout one of APAC’s largest automotive multinationals.
IT supporting assembly, distribution, retail and rental
Tuan Jean’s team has unified the IT functions of four different business units across 10 different markets. Furthermore, driving a digital transformation is not only creating value for the business but for the people working within it.
“It’s fascinating at how many points on a car’s journey from its constituent parts to the customer driving it off the lot, comes into contact with Sime Darby Motors,” he reflects. “Sime Darby Motors is an ‘automotive’ company. However, the business unit is four very different organisations – assembly, distribution, retail and rental. They do very different things that just happen to all involve a car. Most people do not realise the complexity of our business. We need to get closer to our customers. And hence, the technology team is geographically dispersed throughout Asia Pacific.”
Taking technology to the next level
“I was brought into Sime Darby Motors by the current Motors Managing Director to build modern digital & technology capability,” explains Tuan Jean. His team are revolutionising the legacy IT estate. “That’s why we made it our officially stated mission for the Digital Technology team to enable Sime Darby Motors to be the most innovative and digitally savvy organisation with a sustainable future.”
Tuan Jean, along with the other IT team leaders, identified four key focus areas to transformation and achieving the function’s stated goal:
- Build a future-ready digital platform to drive customer experience, and innovation
- Automate and digitalise processes
- Implement modern data analytics & artificial intelligence capabilities.
- Build digital delivery capabilities and develop a methodology to support the company in moving forward quickly
