SwissCham Business Excellence Awards

SWISSCHAM Singapore expanded its annual Business Excellence Awards last year by launching a new award category - the Digital Transformation Award (DX). It received a total of 43 applications from startups, small and medium enterprises and multinational corporations in various sectors. Given the good response to the initiative, the chamber is offering its platform to all organisations in Singapore as well as the Asean region to showcase their digitalisation efforts.

The aim of the award is to present the best-in-class digital transformation initiatives, such as creating new ways of operating and growing businesses through the cloud, mobile, big data and artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain or the use of any other enabling technologies, says the chamber. An international jury of experts screens the applications to pick an overall winner and those in the subcategories.

In addition, the awards process facilitates the exchange of best practice (for example, newsletters and webinars), gives access to unique expertise and a network of experts in the field of digitalisation, it adds.

Five years ago, SwissCham Singapore launched its Business Excellence Awards to honour excellence with the People & Skills Development Award. This award celebrates member companies and Singapore-based organisations having a strong Swiss link which have achieved exceptional success in people management and skills development.

The chamber's next Business Excellence Awards will be presented online at the end of the year.

The overall winner of the inaugural SwissCham DX Award 2020 was Shine Precision Engineering. It was also the winner of the Advanced Manufacturing subcategory.

BT in your inbox

Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox.

Sign Up

Sign Up

Under the Industry 4.0 initiative, the company did a detailed study on its production facilities and processes. Realising the need to improve its process capability and efficiency, it introduced overall equipment efficiency system for 40 computerised numerical control milling and turning machines on the shop floor, set up a robotic cell to automate material handling, and installed tools storage and retrieval to facilitate efficient tool retrieval on a cloud-based HR app.

Swat Mobility was the winner of the Product Digitalisation subcategory. It has developed a technology solution for large-scale employee transport. Employees only need to book their ride on their app, and in minutes, the routing engine plans the routes, and then assigns them the vehicle, all within service parameters discussed with their client beforehand. The manual planning is thus cut by many hours.

The Process Digitalisation subcategory award went to software company Taiger Singapore. Its engineers developed advanced AI products that understand unstructured information in order to automate tasks and simplify processes. This results in decreasing costs, boosting performance, improving compliance and enhancing of the customer experience.

Firmenich was the winner of the B2B subcategory. It developed IRIS, a digital tool developed for Firmenich consumer insights (CI) and sensory communities across regions to manage quantitative tests from the conception of the test to the final report.

IRIS lets CI and sensory teams leverage the richness of consumer and sensory data to save time, simplify processes, explore findings and present results. This digital tool is designed as a mobile application to enable the execution of consumer and sensory tests and the presentation of reports to the customers using smart devices powered by iOS and Android.

SGX and HSBC jointly won the award in the Financial Services subcategory. Their digital asset issuance platform is a fully integrated infrastructure that connects ecosystem participants such as issuers, arranger banks, investors, legal counsel, settlement and custodian banks. This platform achieves the objectives of automation and simplification of the end-to-end bond issuance and servicing process flow. The capabilities of this platform can be further extended to support multiple asset classes and interface with upstream platforms and payment rails.

SwissCham says that the winner of the People & Skills Development Award was selected by an independent jury of Swiss and Singaporean judges. The winner of this award was Acronis, followed by Julius Baer in second place and Givaudan in third place.