Case Study:
KTC (Kim Teck Cheong)
In 2011, East Malaysia FMCG business Kim Teck Cheong had planned to expand to Brunei and other countries in the Southeast Asian region. The company was experiencing unacceptable service delays with their local data centre running in West Malaysia.
KTC decided to adopt Amazon Web Services (AWS) and enlisted local partner G-AsiaPacific to start their cloud adoption journey, leveraging AWS technology to run its SAP Business One application.
G-AsiaPacific helped KTC move more than 10 TB worth of data to AWS, amongst other services. KTC now grows their business and expands their company structure without worrying about server costs, hardware maintenance, or unexpected delays.
Introduction
Kim Teck Cheong (KTC) is one of the largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) businesses in East Malaysia,
employing 471 people at its headquarters in Sabah and secondary office in Sarawak.
The company is a wholesale distributor for Proctor & Gamble, GSK, Danone, Coca-Cola and other companies.
KTC also manufactures its own home-brand products for large retailers, including the Malaysian supermarket chain, Giant.
A family-owned enterprise, KTC estimates a 50 percent business-to-business (B2B) market share in the Malaysian FMCG industry. KTC went on to acquire three new subsidiary companies and most recently became a public listed company
on the ACE market of Bursa Malaysia.
The Challenge
KTC had planned to expand outside of Malaysia to Brunei Darussalam and other countries in the Southeast Asian region. At the time, the KTC’s infrastructure ran on a local data center in West Malaysia. However, the company was experiencing unacceptable service delays.
A Scalable Secure Network
KTC decided to move to a cloud solution that would provide the flexibility the company needed to support its ongoing growth, and offer a reliable and secure infrastructure to host mission critical business applications.
Elimination of Downtime
“We were asking for a lot,” Lau says, “A quick transition to a scalable and secure network that eliminated downtime.
Disaster Recovery Services
Additionally, the company wanted a cloud service provider that could support routine back-ups and disaster recovery for its online data and hosted B2B store. most importantly, offered disaster recovery services to protect our data.”
Expert Required
“If we managed our servers ourselves, we would need to hire employees with specific knowledge and expertise,” says Dexter Lau, Chief Executive Officer. “Not only would this increase our staff costs, but it would also lead to maintenance delays in the event of a staff change.”
Cloud Transformation by AWS & G-AsiaPacific
“From a purely technical perspective AWS had the security, scalability, and service reliability we needed,” says Mark Goh, CEO of G-AsiaPacific.
“We were confident that KTC would be able to secure and protect its business applications by using the AWS Cloud, including its SAP Business One application, Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) application, and Multidocs document management software.”
A Scalable Secure Network
KTC also uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to store content and Amazon CloudFront to deliver content for its business-to-business (B2B) store.
By using Amazon RDS, the company can scale to expand its online catalogue from 180 million items to 450 million items without investing in additional hardware.
Elimination of Downtime
Working with G-AsiaPacific, KTC spent three months planning the move to AWS.
“Because of the AWS infrastructure and wide selection of compute and storage resources, the actual transition of KTC’s critical business applications from a local datacenter to the AWS Cloud only took three weeks,” says Mark Goh, Director of G-AsiaPacific.
Disaster Recovery Solution
The company uses a Cloudberry Lab solution listed on the AWS Marketplace to access and manage files stored in Amazon S3. It also uses the service to back up copies of its online storage as part of its disaster recovery solution.
Expert Required
KTC acquired three new subsidiary companies in 2013 and 2014, and was able to maintain the same number of IT support staff without compromising performance.
“It’s remarkable that we’re able to maintain a lean IT staff base of only three employees,” says Lau
“We now have more than 10 TB of data stored in the cloud for our business systems, with 1.5 TB running through data pipeline. At no time has it seemed necessary to hire new support personnel.”
G-AsiaPacific manages KTC’s environment on AWS, allowing the company to focus on software developments to help it differentiate from other competitors in the FMCG industry.
Testimonial
At AWS Summit KL; Dexter Lau, CEO of KTC (middle) with G-AsiaPacific members, from left to right: Toh Zhen Yang (Country Manager), Mark Goh (CEO), Goh Kiang Kian (Director) and Gordon Chen (CTO)
“With AWS, we can grow our business and expand our company structure without worrying about server costs, hardware maintenance, or unexpected delays.” – Dexter Lau, Executive Director of KTC
KTC takes advantage of the training and support offered by G-AsiaPacific. “Knowledge-sharing was another key reason that we adopted the AWS solution,” says Lau. “We benefit from the knowledge and expertise provided by our business partners in their respective fields.” As a result, KTC doesn’t have to worry about recruiting this expertise.
“With AWS, we can grow our business and expand our company structure without worrying about server costs, hardware maintenance, or unexpected delays,” says Lau. “We’re happy moving towards a long-term business relationship. AWS understands exactly what we need and provides us with effective solutions.”
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