Q: How did this collaboration begin?
Mr Kaw: We opened our Singapore Innovation Centre in 2011 and one of the key things we do here is development work. We needed a company with the experience and capability to help us and that's why, in 2013, we approached GWIA because it's been a partner to P&G since 1977, manufacturing our products for us. Only this time we needed its help in a different area.
Mr Lee: At the innovation centre, we support P&G in making small batches of products that it is conducting research and development (R&D) on. We work with the team here to plan their raw material requirements and manage their warehouse. We prepare the materials for manufacturing within the innovation centre and pack them into test packages.
Q: How is this different from the kind of work GWIA has been doing for P&G since 1977?
Mr Lee: In a normal manufacturing plant we make big quantities of products, but at the innovation centre we make only small batches, and that requires different skills. A production worker at a manufacturing plant has a fixed set of instructions and does the same thing every day.
Here, it's quite different. Each batch run is different, and each formula requires different materials to be fed into the system and at different times, and so you need to work collaboratively with the P&G team.
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Upcoming SME Events
Investing in restaurants in Singapore, Vietnam and Myanmar
Date: Aug 23
Time: 2.30pm to 5.30pm
Venue: SBF Seminar Room 1, 22nd Floor, Keppel Towers
Fee: Free for SBF and RAS members; $50 for non-SBF members
The Singapore Business Federation is organising a seminar - with support from the Restaurant Association of Singapore - on business opportunities at home as well as in Myanmar and Vietnam through direct investments, franchising and other commercial arrangements for Singapore companies.
Besides rising affluence, there are other socio-economic trends that will boost growth in the restaurant and food retail services sector in these places.
They include increasing urbanisation, health and wellness consciousness, such as switching to organic or premium foods; busier, more hectic lifestyles, which will benefit fast-food chains; and the Westernisation of food choices.
Throughout the Asia-Pacific, domestic fast-food chains, including small-scale local ones, will expand and attract consumers by offering quality products and by targeting suburban areas ignored by multinational chains.
For enquires on registration, contact Ms Yvonne Pang (tel: 6827-6882) or e-mail at yvonne.pang@sbf.org.sg and Ms Loi Min Qian (tel: 6827-6848) or e-mail at minqian.loi@sbf.org.sg
Mr Kaw: It's more dynamic work. We also rely on GWIA's team members, who are stationed at our innovation centre, to give us feedback if they think we are going in the wrong direction since they know the production process so well.
Q: What was the main challenge that GWIA faced when it was first entrusted with this new kind of production work?
Mr Lee: In the early days, we had to learn how to match the right profile of worker to this job. We thought of transferring people from our existing plant over to the innovation centre but we soon found that was not feasible.
So we hired a fresh group of workers to match this working environment.
In a plant, you don't collaborate so much; you take instructions from your plant manager and you execute. Here, you have to collaborate with the researchers so you would need communication skills and you have to be comfortable using higher-end technology.
Q: How have you benefited as a company from this collaboration?
Mr Lee: We learnt how to better manage quality in our processes, lessons which we can apply across our four plants - we have one in Singapore and three in Malaysia.
And from an innovation perspective, there's always something to learn here and that has helped us in other areas of work. For example, we manufacture Ambi Pur air freshener for P&G and thanks to what we've learnt at the innovation centre, we've been able to have discussions with P&G's other business units about making a better type of packaging for the Ambi Pur car kits that we manufacture in Malaysia.
We've also learnt how to manufacture smaller batches with greater cost efficiency. In manufacturing, it's more cost efficient to make millions of units than just one or two batch runs. But from our work at the innovation centre, we've learnt how to make smaller batches at lower cost.
This makes it easier when our clients want to push out a seasonal or promotional product.
Mr Kaw: Three years ago, GWIA had three people stationed with us, and now it has 37, and we're looking to grow that to 50 in the next year or so.
Q: Why did P&G choose to partner with an SME and not a bigger company that may already be more established in R&D-related work?
Mr Kaw: Flexibility, agility and the willingness to partner are some key traits that SMEs generally have, which counterbalances what a big multinational like P&G doesn't.
And especially in an innovation centre, we need more flexibility and agility because things change, batches fail, ideas don't work, so you need a partner with the right mindset to make it work.
Over the last five years, the innovation centre has been a huge success. We have been able to experiment, perfect and invent brand innovations for the Asia-Pacific market and globally, and GWIA has been at the heart of that journey.
The company works with us side by side, dealing with proprietary information. The level of trust that we have enables that work.
