Owned by the Malaysian Government, SIRIM is Malaysia’s industrial research and technology organization. SIRIM’s vision is to be the best partner for innovation, which meant enhancing its internal processes and discovering innovative ways to serve industries better. SIRIM is one of the first cloud-based government-owned companies in Malaysia. “We automated many business processes and workflows, and we continue to transform our internal processes with Microsoft products,” said Tengku Intan, Chief Digital & Information Officer at SIRIM.
As the leading organization for technology and quality solutions in Malaysia, SIRIM undertakes scientific research to boost industrial efficiency. Its strong focus on innovation helps drive competitiveness in the market. In keeping with its strategic goal of digitalization, SIRIM began its digital transformation journey back in 2018.
SIRIM had been using Microsoft products since 1997. In 2013, it upgraded to Microsoft 365 primarily to resolve the company’s mailbox storage limits. Soon though, the company realized that their physical data infrastructure also had limitations. Despite having many servers, SIRIM still needed a disaster recovery data center which would ensure the availability of its critical systems. The management team soon realized that investing in more on-premise infrastructure was not cost-effective or efficient. SIRIM then decided to move its business to the cloud, saving not only IT costs and gaining reliable backups, but also future-proofing SIRIM’s business operations.
SIRIM chose Microsoft Azure as its cloud partner as it had confidence in Microsoft products. “We decided to move our data from on-prem servers to Microsoft Azure as it guarantees 99.9% availability of backups in case of a disaster,” says Intan.
Automating business processes
When the pandemic hit the world, SIRIM developed JEJAQ, an internal contact tracing app much before MySejahtera—the contact tracing app developed by the Malaysian government. “My team actually came out with the JEJAQ app within one week, using Power Apps and the Azure low code application development environment,” Intan shares with pride. “The first version was out in April 2020 and by December 2020 we were on the fourth version.”
Motivated by the success story of JEJAQ app development, the SIRIM team continues to leverage Azure for app development and automation of business processes and workflows. “We start small and then scale fast,” reveals Intan. “We can refine, update, and recreate what we build and that’s what we love the most about the low code environment that Azure provides.” The in-house app development led to massive savings as well. “We estimate RM1.5 million of cost avoidance as we did not have to engage technology partners to develop apps, thanks to the low code platform and Power Apps,” Intan adds.
Opportunity for further growth
The company has streamlined its processes by moving to Microsoft Azure and employees are able to work on-the-go or from their home. The digitization of business processes has resulted in increased efficiency ranging from 50 percent to 150 percent. To take this even further, SIRIM is testing a proof of concept Microsoft Dynamics 365 environment and use of Microsoft Teams to enable online services.
Looking forward, SIRIM wants to expedite digitization and automate manual business processes. Indeed, the tech organziation wants to make the most out of what Microsoft Azure has to offer. “There are many tools within Microsoft Azure and we are still exploring them. We intend to use Microsoft tools for our UI/UX platform in the future,” reveals Intan. “We see an opportunity to increase our income by up to 400% from enabling our services online.” A compelling idea, indeed.
“My team actually came out with the JejaQ app within one week, using Power Apps and the Microsoft Azure low code application development environment.”
Tengku Intan, Chief Digital & Information Officer, SIRIM Berhad
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