When countries around the world started closing their borders as COVID-19 spread, many businesses stepped up their digitization in a hurry to minimize disruptions, especially if their operations are extensive.

People Matters asked Khoo Kok Yeow, Head of IT & Digital at palm oil agribusiness giant Golden Agri-Resources, about the digitization measures that had worked for the company's sprawling business when the extent of the pandemic became apparent. GAR, one of the world's largest palm oil plantation companies, is headquartered in Singapore with operations in Indonesia, China, Europe, and the US; it owns and manages almost all of its supply chain, from the plantation business to its own refineries and chartering business, and even a deep-sea port. Here's what he shared.

What has the impact of COVID-19 been on your various operations?

We are an integrated palm oil company with operations ranging from providing seeds to producing sustainable palm oil products that can be found on supermarket shelves. As such, we have employees who are based in different types of locations—plantations, mills and refineries which are in suburban areas, and offices in cities such as Jakarta and Singapore.

For those based in offices, the impact has been minimal. Most of our employees are able to operate from home, leveraging on virtual desktop technology. During the peak of COVID-19, our offices were nearly empty, with employees operating fully from home. Now that movement restrictions have eased, we are slowly reintroducing employees to the workplace, but only in staggered groups, with many still operating from home.

Since crude palm oil is deemed an essential product, we have maintained continued operations at our refineries. Besides adhering to government measures, we introduced an even stricter set of requirements including contact tracing, health declaration, self-quarantine and ad-hoc testing at the premises. We have also been careful to localize our requirements based on each respective country’s or city’s government regulations.

The impact on our overall operations, especially in the area of logistics and transportation can be seen and felt. We have encountered delays since many third party logistics companies and other companies along the value chain were operating at reduced staff strength.

What are the digital technologies that have helped to keep operations running smoothly during this period? Were these already in use, or did you choose to bring in new tools to address the impact of lockdowns?

To a large extent, IT plays an active role to ensure business operations can continue despite the constraint of not being able to operate from offices.

The foundational technologies such as virtual meeting capability, virtual desktop capability and VPN access to Enterprise Systems have always been there. It was the scaling up of such capabilities that posed some challenges during the early days of the lockdown.

It took us a relatively short but intensive two weeks to scale up our infrastructure. Subsequently, our employees were able to operate with minimal disruptions.

We have since introduced additional capabilities such as digital signatures on soft copy documents to facilitate approval processes, replacing hard copy circulation of documents; a contact tracing app to track the movement of our employees within the offices; and replacing our attendance system with facial recognition technology that eliminates the need for physical contact with the devices.

Could you share the factors you consider when choosing which technologies to adopt and implement?

The basic principles we have adopted when it comes to technology is to ensure the solutions or technologies are:

1. Fit-for-purpose; i.e. we invest only in technologies that fill a gap, or solve a problem for the business;

2. Future proof; i.e. the solution needs to be something that can withstand the ‘time factor’ and is still relevant even after a number of years;

3. Where applicable, the solution needs to address the overall health and safety aspect; e.g. using facial recognition to capture attendance instead of using a fingerprinting device.

On the whole, where do you feel digitization has made the greatest improvement in your operations?

History has shown that humans will always adapt to situations.

I think the adoption of technology among employees in these few examples that I have described, is not a one-time phenomenon—it is here to stay. I believe our employees will continue to use and leverage these technologies beyond the pandemic, and this will become our ‘new normal’. To a large extent, it is likely to even improve our operational efficiency if technologies are leveraged in the right manner.

COVID-19 has pushed many companies to speed up their investment in technologies. Could you share whether GAR's own investment timeline for technologies has been accelerated as well?

Our investment outlook for technologies, hasn’t changed much. The basic principles that I have described for how we approach introducing new technology still apply. It is about reacting to a specific situation accordingly. No doubt, certain investments were brought forward in view of the current situation. However, looking at the bigger picture, we have a multi-year plan, and we will continue to execute our investments based on that plan.