Here's how some organisations in Asia Pacific are using modern enterprise apps, cloud and augmented reality to future-proof themselves:
Thailand’s KBank turns to Veeam to save IT costs
Photo: Unsplash
Thailand’s Kasikornbank (KBank) has replaced its legacy backup system with Veeam Availability Suite to support its goal of becoming a digital-first bank. The move will help the bank save 900 administrative hours each month and US$70,000 ($95,311.65) in IT costs annually, as well as comply with data privacy regulations from the Bank of Thailand.
“One critical requirement for digital transformation is modern data protection, but the bank’s legacy backup solution wasn’t capable of delivering that. Backup required us to manually verify the success or failure of every backup and re-run the failed ones,” says Surapan Chaimahapruek, assistant managing director of Kasikorn Business Technology Group, which is KBank’s technology subsidiary.
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He adds: “Recovery was another issue. It was difficult and slow. In certain cases, we could spend more than four hours recovering a single database, which didn’t meet business requirements or support regulatory requirements.”
To address those issues, Veeam backs up 2 petabytes (PB) across 1,800 virtual machines (VM) and 120 physical machines to Hewlett Packard Enterprise StoreOnce in a secure on-site cloud. StoreOnce replicates data to a separate site for regulatory compliance and disaster recovery. Since Veeam integrates with HPE StoreOnce Catalyst, backup is fast and reliable, and recovery takes minutes instead of hours.
KBank is also leveraging Instant VM Recovery and Veeam Explorer for Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server to reduce recovery time by 300%.
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Besides that, the bank is using Veeam DataLabs, which allows administrators to create isolated environments to verify the recoverability of backups for regulatory compliance. Verifying recoverability for compliance now takes only one week, as compared to months previously.
Luxury resort operator Soneva moves its finance operations to the cloud with Workday
Photo: Soneva
Luxury resort operator Soneva is digitally transforming its finance operations across Thailand and Maldives with the help of Workday, an enterprise cloud apps provider.
By deploying Workday’s Financial Management solution, Soneva will fully transition its finance operations to the cloud. This will enable the business to boost efficiency and make the right decisions with actionable insights to mitigate uncertainty amid a dynamic business landscape.
Soneva can also largely eliminate manual, tedious processes by leveraging the in- intelligent automation and augmented analytics capabilities of Workday’s solution. As such, they will be able to spend more time and resources on strategic value-adding tasks, such as data analysis that will empower them to make smarter, insight-driven business decisions.
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“As travel steadily restarts and we continue to expand our operations and reach across the globe, we need a technology partner who can scale and grow with us. With Workday, we look forward to simplifying and automating our accounting and finance workflows, and harnessing real-time actionable insights that will empower the business and allow us to achieve sustainable growth in the long-term,” says Quentin Morice, Soneva’s corporate director of finance.
Sandeep Sharma, president of Asia at Workday, adds: “Amid the uncertainties of tomorrow, one thing is for certain — technology remains a key imperative for success, and forward-looking organisations need to ride on the digital disruption wave to stay relevant and accelerate their growth. We are delighted to be supporting Soneva in realising its finance digital transformation goals, as the brand positions itself for future growth and expansion globally.”
TeamViewer helps Ricoh Japan to enhance its customer support and training
Photo: Ricoh
Ricoh, a leading imaging and electronics company, is leveraging TeamViewer’s solutions to digitalise its processes in technical customer and employee training in Japan.
By using TeamViewer’s secure remote connectivity solution to remotely connect to the customers’ computers, Ricoh Japan’s support staff can help clients set up the connection between computer and printer or multifunctional devices. As a result, the response time for service requests is shortened by an average of two hours per case.
As the next step, Ricoh is looking at embedding TeamViewer’s software directly into its printers. This will enable its customer support staff to access printing devices directly and provide even more advanced remote support to its customers.
Ricoh Japan is also using TeamViewer’s solutions for on-the-job training.
Junior engineers working locally on customers’ printers or copiers can easily seek AR-based from remotely connected senior engineers through TeamViewer’s solution Assist AR via smartphones and smart glasses. This ensures a seamless knowledge transfer between senior and junior engineers, as well as empower Ricoh Japan to maintain its high level of customer satisfaction, even if there is a shortage of senior engineers.
“The various use cases we enable at Ricoh Japan are great examples of how TeamViewer supports companies in digitalising their entire value chain. Significantly decreasing response time in customer support, establishing new ways of training and onboarding, and ensuring proper knowledge transfer in times of global shortage of skilled workforce are tangible results of the value that our products bring to both our clients and their customers,” says Sojung Lee, president for Asia Pacific at TeamViewer.
Solar power firm REC Group leverage S/4 HANA on Azure to become data-driven
Photo: REC Group
REC Group, a solar energy company, has upgraded its enterprise resource planning system to SAP S/4 HANA and is running it on the Microsoft Azure cloud to run more efficient reporting and analytics.
REC can now get real-time analysis in S/4HANA using Fiori applications — apps that provide easy access to common SAP functions — which enables operational reporting on live transactional data.
Its employees can also conduct multidimensional analytics online, breaking down information and looking deeply into data to analyse the company’s financial health.
“Our finance team can effectively carry out profitability, cash flow and financial analysis without having to create custom reports. As a result, they have clearer visibility on our spending, material production cost, and components,” says Shamal De Silva, director, head of IT/IS at REC Group.
Besides that, REC gained real-time visibility of its inventory. This allows its supply chain management and planning team to minimise the risk of overstocking or understocking, organise the transport of supplies accordingly, as well as ensure prompt deliveries to customers.
Using the cloud also enables REC to manage large amounts of product information, which is crucial for quality assurance and warranty claims. Since REC offers a 25-year warranty for its solar panels, it uses a unique serial number embossed on every solar panel. By using Azure File Sync, REC can store the images of those serial numbers on the cloud and use them to process warranty claims for quality checks as necessary.
