e-business will soon take a rebound
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In cooperation with the Asian GLOBE-The Jakarta CEO Club and MarkPlus & Co. management consulting firm, this new column is designed to look at the visions and strategic views of CEOs of Indonesian and multinational companies operating in Indonesia. It will appear every Thursday with the support of marketing guru Hermawan Kertajaya. Following is the first piece on the CEO of PT SAP Asia in Indonesia, a subsidiary of the Germany-based e- business software solutions provider. It's compiled by The Jakarta Post reporter K. Basrie. ----------------------------------------------------------------
Over the past few years, the world witnessed the ugly ruin of the online businesses. Many firmly insist that the online world has just been something of a bust. So what went wrong?
Many blame the failure on the costs which were higher than expected and the benefits more elusive than anticipated. Liquidity, rather than the build-out capabilities, quickly became the number one priority for many dot-companies as they struggled to survive.
Most of the dotcoms were geared on how to gain capital from the market rather than how to give value to customers.
Will the future still have a gloomy look after the well- publicized sad story of the Internet world? Early efforts have stumbled, to be sure. But many now doubt it. They say there'll be a change very soon.
Take a brief look at world-class companies around the globe. From procurement to product design to supply chain management, the Internet and e-business have changed the way organizations operate and enterprises serve customers and win the rigid competition.
The community, still small but growing , has the belief that the e-business is a permanent feature on the business landscape today and tomorrow.
Krisnendu Datta, managing director of PT SAP Indonesia, believed that the real players of e-commerce are beginning to evolve and return in different forms.
"As that evolves, we'll see people's confidence coming back and doing more of e-commerce based solutions into their business," he said in a recent interview.
SAP, Datta went on, survived from the bubble burst because "we did not jump into the dotcom bandwagon and try to play the IPO game and try to run and acquire few companies with high market capitalization, rather we focused on how we could enrich our solutions using e-business technology using the e-commerce tools and then go back to the same and other customers with added value."
According to him, it's hightime for any companies in Indonesia to go for e-business.
A rich bachelor will never be ready to marry, Datta said.
"So, I don't' think there's one particular time to go for e- business. The time is now. The time is always there."
One, he added, can choose areas where he can go by looking on at his own business models by looking on what he can achieve in the end and e-business should not be driven by technology or me- too business.
And globalization also offers opportunities and challenges, instead of risks alone.
"As a global player, our main challenges in SAP is not the hardest of the (Indonesian) government. Our main challenges are how ready the market is, in term of people's ability and what the IT does for them."
Datta, who has been in the IT industry for 14 years, reminded that growth is not the sole goal in the business world since growth is sometimes uncontrolled and non-profitable.
"That's why growth alone is not the only thing that we should challenge in business."
Based on his experience, there are two fundamentals ways to grow.
"First grow in your solution set by offering more products and solution within the same customer base or within the same geography or you enhance your geography with the same solution set.
Do either one or you can do the combination. In case of SAP, we're doing both," Datta said.
In today's world of e-business, the traditionally sequential and stable links between internal departments in a company and external business partners cede the to complex, multilevel supply chain networks. SAP offers products that will allow companies to manage a wide range of highly diverse systems from a multitude of vendors -- systems that run in different technological environments.
Indonesia, Datta said, is home to roughly 4,000 firms with an annual earnings of between US$30 million and $40 million, which has become the main targets of SAP Indonesia.
"About 60 percent of the market is still untapped," he said.
He, thus, invited IT players to grab the big opportunities.
"The question is the timeframe. This market still needs certain amount of awareness, infrastructure, knowledge based for IT to grow and that takes time," he said, adding that the perfect time to get in would be over the next five years.
But he suggested that knowledge is a crucial element for any company to grow and develop in such a competitive era.
Unfortunately, knowledge does not appear in the balance sheet.
Today, he said, knowledge management is not about acquiring knowledge alone but sharing knowledge to others, including to the employees.
Having tens of knowledge workers is much better and more powerful than having one knowledge manager, he said.
Well, while there's uncertainty about the speed of change, there's no question about the direction of change. And let the rich bachelor make his own judgment.
================ For the information box:
PT SAP Indonesia is a 100-percent subsidiary of SAP AG, the world's leading provider of e-business software solutions operating in 67 countries. Already in Indonesia since 1997, the company has 40 employees, 200 partner consultants with 75 clients and some 110 installations.
Datta has been in the IT industry for 14 years including in his motherland in India and several countries in the region. A top graduate from Calcutta University in India majoring in physics, he get his MBA certificate from the European Management School on Surrey, U.K.