In 2005, Far East Organization launched the inaugural Business Process Improvement (BPI) Awards. This is an annual organisational awards programme to recognise and reward departments that have made the most improvements to their work processes during the year, resulting in increased efficiency, higher productivity, as well as enhanced revenue generation and cost management.

The qualifying period for BPI projects in the 2005 Awards programme spanned 1 December 2004 to 30 November 2005. A total of 26 submissions were received representing almost all of the Organization. The teams presented their BPI projects to the Top Executives over a two and a half day period, which culminated in a voting for the top three most improved departments.

The Top Award for the most improved department selected by the Top Executives is the total wage roll representing one month’s basic salary of the winning department, to be distributed among the team members. Two Merit Awards were also given, each with the aggregate of half a month’s basic salary of the respective winning departments.

The awards were presented by our Chief Executive Officer, Mr Philip Ng, at the Far East Organization Annual Dinner and Dance on 16 December 2005.

Landmark highlights the 2005 award-winning BPI projects.

The Central Engineering Department is a group operations resource providing engineering services to Far East Organization’s business units. The team supports a diverse portfolio of nine serviced residences totaling 1,000 units, 438 corporate leasing apartments, six hotels with a total of 2,026 rooms, and five commercial developments.

During the BPI review period, the Central Engineering – Property Unit embarked on a programme to reinvent its key engineering processes. This required a fresh look into the paper-based system of manually tracking and managing the 9,000 work requests the unit was receiving every month, its manual filing system and daily site inspections. These processes were time-consuming, cumbersome and inefficient, affecting the response time and quality of service to customers.

A Computerised Integrated Facilities Management (CIFM) system was customised to automate the daily work request process. With the aid of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and mobile phones, the system facilitates real time, real place tracking of individual jobs attended to by the technicians. In turn, the technicians are able to meet customers’ requests with greater speed and accuracy. In the process, a transparent, systematic record of engineering services transaction types/times as well as tracking of productivity levels is institutionalised. The system also enables the generation of quality reports to support analysis, decision-making and preventive maintenance programmes.

Central Housekeeping – Hotels Unit is a centralised group resource providing housekeeping services to Far East Hotels. With our hotels enjoying strong business and high occupancies, the housekeeping team had to cope with meeting high daily room quotas and delivering clean and neat rooms speedily with consistently high standards of service. It had to find new and better ways of going about its daily tasks to extract efficiencies from its operations and to achieve more with less.

A comprehensive training programme formed an integral part of Central Housekeeping’s BPI project. Room attendants underwent On-the-Job Training in our five Far East Hotels. Qualified room attendants were empowered to inspect and release vacant clean rooms to the front office, significantly expediting the turnaround of guestrooms. The work of room attendants was redesigned and simplified with the help of new, more effective equipment that can perform multiple functions. The implementation of a structured periodic cleaning programme, duty manager checklists and joint inspections by Housekeeping, Engineering and hotel GMs facilitated regular, systematic monitoring and assurance of the cleanliness and conditions of the hotels’ front of house, guestrooms and other facilities. The team actively identifies cost/time saving as well as revenue generation opportunities in its operations. Through its BPI project, Central Housekeeping – Hotels Unit has successfully reinvented its work processes to better serve the needs and operations of our hotel business.

Our Organization’s beliefs – Philosophy, People, Processes, Products and Profits – form the cornerstones of the BPI project by Corporate Affairs to reinvent Marketing Communications. As the work of Corporate Affairs entails a high level of creative input from the team, we recognise that a shift in mindset is critical to drive change in our People, Processes and Products. The BPI project necessitated a paradigm shift in Corporate Affairs’ approach from a traditional functional support role to developing multi-functional capabilities to drive product and corporate brand identity management and communication. These capabilities were evident in the successful execution of integrated marketing communications campaigns for two new product category launches – New Age Office at Central and Novena Medical Center - to present the Organization’s products effectively to the marketplace and our customers.

To facilitate organisation-wide sharing of marketing communications knowledge and resources, Corporate Affairs created a Marketing ShareNet with comprehensive Pre-Qualified Suppliers and Standard Operating Procedures. This shared central resource shortened learning curve, enhanced organisational capabilities in events management, widened market reach, increased speed-to-market and achieved better servicing of customers’ needs and preferences. The Marketing ShareNet creates long-term, sustainable value as an organisational knowledge asset, which is institutionalised and has pervasive application.