Alliance Contract Manufacturing Sdn Bhd

By Erik Looi, Senior Manager, Head of IT, Alliance Contract Manufacturing Sdn Bhd

Erik Looi, Senior Manager, Head of IT, Alliance Contract Manufacturing Sdn Bhd

Alliance Contract Manufacturing Sdn Bhd (ACM) is established 1998. We are a Malaysian enterprise headquartered in Penang, Malaysia for the last 20 years, with core business in areas of precision machining, systems assembly and sheet metal manufacturing. ACM builds innovations through ventures into emerging technologies, which include additive manufacturing (AM), electric vehicles (EV), life sciences (LS) and robotics. We have grown with additional seven manufacturing locations across different countries in three major continents. A contract manufacturer as our core, we work with customers from different industry verticals, making different skills in manufacturing processes a necessity, and strength.

Ventures into innovation prototyping and our own product manufacturing have made managing our business even more challenging. B2C is a new area of business from our traditional B2B customer interactions.

Digital domain is borderless and limitless on the possibilities to scale and be agile. Digital transformation is necessary to enable our business to do just that. We recognize Information Technology (IT) as the enabler of our business at a very early stage. IT is naturally a starting point for digital transformations. However, transformations are not purely based on technology, it includes processes and our most important asset, people. Transformations on our workforce and their mindset are a critical part of digital transformations, and this aspect is often overlooked.

ACM needs to transform at the speed of our business. New business processes, new way of interacting with customers, and partners.

The adoption of the Industry 4.0 (I4.0) framework can accelerate this transformation. We need to be ready for business opportunities that do not even exist yet.

This is not a lone journey, we need partners. SAP has been selected as the trusted partner back in 2003 to bring us to where we are today. ACM I4.0 Initiative was set up in August 2017 and with that, SAP became our key member. The ACM I4.0 is not a typical vendor engagement to roll out digital products. These selected partners are part of ACM’s journey on digital transformation. We collaborate, try out ideas, create and execute in an actual manufacturing environment.

ACM started with SAP 4.6C, then moved on to ECC6 (2008), subsequently to HANA DB (2014), Simple Finance (sFIN, 2015) and S/4HANA (2018). SAP, perceived as costly to most customers when we started off, is viewed strategically by ACM. SAP provides best of business processes built into the system, fully documented. SAP has brought confidence of doing business for a growing company with big visions. Having established business processes from the start on a world-class platform, builds confidence to our customers, and continues to do so. Over the past year, we have changed how we manage our business through new business design, more intuitive user interfaces and experiences, “LIVE”. ACM continues to evolve with SAP and we welcome the transition of R/3 to S/4, which is radical.

• New Business Design: Our employees are more focused on the job at hand, the business. Not on which transaction and operational steps need to be executed. They are more pro-active through insights, and assistance in their decision making from the system.

• User Experience: We work more with information and less with data. Analytics and intuitive presentation of information enable effective consumption of our business status.

• LIVE: Information is presented live. ACM Group operates globally like a single manufacturing concern. So having our business status globally, at its current instance (live), is priceless.

On-premise, Hybrid, Cloud, Cloud Platform, Cloud Services and connectivity options allow ACM to continue to advance and grow on SAP. We work on ACM’s business needs with SAP on the various options we have at our disposal to enable them. There is no end to innovations. We are moving to our own products manufacturing, and end-consumer interactions. ACM is entering into an even larger customer base, and also research and development collaborations. We are building a platform that enables newer avenues for interaction, providing better customer experiences and more effective collaborations with our partners. Digital domain is borderless, so the world is our marketplace!

Digital transformation. “In the new world, it is not the big fish that eats the small fish, it is the fast fish that eats the slow fish”.

Check out: The Manufacturing Outlook