Far East Organization honoured at SBR Technology Excellence Awards

A new digital strategy enables the developer to drive customer and employee experience and intensify its market impact.

Singapore’s largest private property developer Far East Organization has built more than 780 developments including over 55,000 homes in the country since its establishment in 1960. In addition to its property trading operations, the company with 2,500 employees owns and manages a multi-segment real estate investment and leasing portfolio comprising residential, hospitality, retail, commercial, healthcare and industrial properties with a total net lettable area of over 14 million square feet.

Far East Organization’s Group Information Technology (IT) team spearheads the conceptualisation and implementation of robust IT solutions to support this vast and diverse portfolio. The goal is to facilitate the sustainable growth of the business with agility in a rapidly evolving environment. Through its Group IT Digital Lab, Far East Organization embarked on a digital transformation journey with a view to reinventing the customer experience, improving operational efficiency, productivity and employee engagement, and harnessing the value and potential of its digital assets. Central to this effort is a strategy to leverage cloud technologies to build a secure and scalable digital business technology platform which enables the team to rapidly develop and deploy customised solutions to address various business and organisational needs.

For its achievements in harnessing digital innovation to advance its customer and people strategy, Far East Organization emerged the winner in the Digital – Real Estate category at this year’s SBR Technology Excellence Awards.

Notable achievements by Far East Organization include:

• The launch of a digital sales kit to support the sale of residential and commercial properties, at One Holland Village Residences and Woods Square respectively.
• The development of analytical dashboards to drive revenue management of the corporate real estate leasing business by reducing vacancy levels and optimising rental rates based on competitive market pricing analysis.
• Development of a workflow system to route and capture internal management decisions and approvals involving more than 200 development and investment companies within the Far East Organization stable. This e-Memo system significantly reduced the amount of manual paperwork that is still prevalent within the real estate industry, particularly for processes related to construction and development projects. The intelligent online workflow has also resulted in improved communications, knowledge management and efficiency in the Organization’s integrated work processes.
• The development of autonomous software bots using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technologies to automate manual, repetitive processes within the hospitality management, human resources and information technology departments.

The Group IT Digital Lab also leveraged its expertise to address the unprecedented disruption to the business brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. An in-house customised app was developed to track employees’ work arrangements/locations, temperature and other related health and travel declarations, and to alert the right organisational personnel for action. A similar app has been developed for visitors to the Organization’s property sales galleries and show units, and is ready for deployment when viewing is allowed to resume. Together, these solutions aim to keep our customers, partners and staff members safe as the business re-starts on a strong footing while staying compliant with safe management measures mandated by the authorities.

According to Far East Organization’s Executive Director and Group Head of HR & IT, Jodie Choo, the Digital Lab enables the Organization to capture new value, rapidly turning innovative ideas into tangible solutions that deliver business benefits. “The solutions also provide insights that were previously unavailable, which allow us to better understand our customers, the market and the general real estate landscape.” she concluded.

Watch the interview below to know more about their winning project:

The Technology Excellence Awards, presented by Singapore Business Review, was held via video conferencing throughout the first and second week of June.

This year’s nominations were judged by a panel consisting of Daryl Pereira, Head of Cyber at KPMG; Cheang Wai Keat, Head of Advisory Services in Singapore and ASEAN Technology Consulting Leader at Ernst & Young; Chin Chee Choon, Advisory Leader and Assurance Director at Nexia TS; Rizwi Wun, Partner, Acting Head of Intellectual Property and Technology Practice Group at RHTLaw Asia; Carolyn Chin-Parry, Managing Director and Digital Accelerator Leader at PwC.

If you would like to join the 2021 awards and be acclaimed for your company’s exceptional technological innovations, please email Julie Anne Nuñez at [email protected]