SSW, a leading logistics company under the Temasek portfolio, faced growing inefficiencies due to manual processes in its rapidly expanding healthcare and food logistics businesses. With a strong need for centralized financial and operational management, SSW turned to Oracle NetSuite, implemented by NuVista, to streamline operations across procurement, finance, and logistics.

The decision to implement Oracle NetSuite came after a thorough evaluation process involving several ERP platforms, including SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and Navision. Ultimately, Oracle NetSuite’s affordability and scalability, combined with NuVista’s superior implementation expertise, made it the clear choice.

Despite a challenging 6-month timeline, NuVista successfully implemented the solution, enabling SSW to achieve significant improvements in productivity and operational control. The ERP system has laid the foundation for future expansion, including potential integrations with HR systems, ensuring SSW remains agile and compliant in an evolving market.

Singapore CFO Summit 2024

CFOs role as strategic partner to CEO & board members

The Singapore CFO Summit brought together finance leaders from diverse industries to discuss the evolving role of CFOs as strategic partners to CEOs and board members. The event featured keynote speeches, panel discussions, and presentations on key topics such as digital transformation, modernizing finance ecosystems, and cloud ERP solutions.

During the summit, Vijay, NuVista’s Managing Director, had an insightful conversation with Lim Shiou Liang, Head of IT and Group CISO at Singapore Storage & Warehouse (SSW), a Temasek-owned logistics company. Shiou Liang shared SSW’s journey of digital transformation with Oracle NetSuite and highlighted the crucial role it played in optimizing operations and supporting the company’s rapid growth.

Vijay: Today I have invited one of our esteemed customers, Mr Lim Shiou Liang, IT and CISO director for SSW, which is a Temasek owned company. Shiou Liang, could you introduce yourself?

Shiou Liang: I’m Shiou Liang, you can call me SL. I am currently the head of IT and CISO for SSW. As Vijay said, we are a Temasek Portfolio company. So Temasek, Governance, risk management, compliance are all very important to us hence why we are embarking on this ERP. Basically what SSW does is we are in the logistic domain. We have 2 BUs. One specializing in food solutions, the other in health care logistics. Very different BUs. And that poses a very great challenge to us.

Vijay: So I would like to check, why did you decide to implement that ERP system for your group?

Shiou Liang: So, SSW, we started in 1987, managing the national rights of power. In 2019 we actually grew very fast, throughout, during the COVID period. We had a startup which is this healthcare logistics. Being a startup, things were done manually initially and at the rate of our growth we thought that it doesn’t make sense anymore and we needed an ERP system to manage all our finance, procurement, transactions, bearing in mind that we may be likely to tap on other functions as well such as HR management system in the future.

So, well, this is what we had to do. Doing manual processing is a tough thing, documents are being managed inefficiently. So it doesn’t work for all of us, for my procurement colleagues, for my finance colleagues, I see them suffering. So we discussed and we put forth this project to the board and that’s how we got started with this ERP system project.

Vijay: I would like to check, like, what are the various ERP systems, which you have evaluated before you have decided on Oracle NetSuite? 

Shiou Liang: So this one, I understand the audience are mainly CFOs right. So, affordability is always a key issue. That will start off the sizing of what ERP system is suitable for us. So we explored the market. I think common names are SAP, Microsoft, Dynamics, Navision, Oracle NetSuite, and a few others. So we wanted something that would fit us, and actually we zoomed down to 2 platforms, Navision and Oracle NetSuite. Every organization has different needs, adapt it to your size and what you can afford, that’s very important.

Vijay: Thank you. I would like to check out, why did you choose NuVista as your implementation partner? 

Shiou Liang: So we invited a few vendors, in fact direct competitors to NuVista who are also supplying Oracle NetSuite solution and we have a very robust tender procurement process and we set up criteria, this was established by not only the function owners and procurement team, but other support functions such as IT and infosecurity as well so all in all once we evaluated, NuVista came up tops and that’s how we recommended them as our choice for this ERP system.

Vijay: How was your implementation experience? 

Shiou Liang: Okay. Implementation, it was crazy. Why? Let me explain. 6 months. I had 6 months to implement the ERP system, this is crazy. Bear in mind, this was done between September to 31st March. One lesson I would like to share is, be careful of December, that doesn’t exist. Nobody works in December or even from Mid-November onwards. And then in January, Chinese New Year, people are on half gear so when you work in that part of the calendar year I think we had 4 months and it was crazy.

Yatin the project manager from NuVista  really ran our team to manage the stakeholders, finance colleagues, the procurement, sales, even my IT guys are coming together to schedule them to do the scoping, testing and before we go-live. So this was very, very tough, So again, be careful of December because nobody works then.

Vijay: And, one more question is what advice would you give to other companies considering an ERP implementation?

Shiou Liang: I will say that, you need very project management skills, you need a very strong project manager. Why, again ERP system you to a few stakeholders, up, down, horizontally, vertically and the challenge is always managing these stakeholders. After you get them buying, how do you get them to sit down at the table and scope the requirements with you, this is always a challenge. So make sure you get a strong project manager on the site and at the same time make sure that your SI or vendor is able to provide you with a strong project manager from their side. This is very important.