Upskilling employees is a key step in digital transformation for SMEs: Low Yen Ling
With the right skills, employees can ensure tools are optimised and integrated for business needs, say panellists at a post-Budget roundtable discussion
[SINGAPORE] Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can succeed in their digital transformation only by transforming their workforce as well, Senior Minister of State for Trade and Industry Low Yen Ling said this week.
Speaking at a post-Budget roundtable discussion hosted by The Business Times (BT) and presented by global cloud accounting platform Xero Asia on Tuesday (Mar 25), she said: “When you have enterprise transformation going hand in hand with workforce transformation, you will have digital transformation.
“You will see that intent translating to impact,” she added. This is why the government has introduced the SkillsFuture Workforce Development Grant, part of the S$400 million Enterprise Workforce Transformation Package announced in Budget 2025.
It brings together and streamlines several existing grants, while focusing on job redesign – an integral part of workforce transformation, she said.
Fellow panellist Koren Wines, managing director of Xero Asia, said upskilling is critical because employees who have upgraded their skills can then continue to innovate and look for more ways to optimise processes.
“Technology continues to move,” she added. “You have to keep going, and you have to build a change-ready organisation.”
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Forming a strategy
Another key aspect of digitalisation is ensuring that the organisation’s digital tools are well-integrated with one another, said Wines.
“This is so that data is moving seamlessly back and forth between all your tools to create, essentially, an environment where you have access to the insights that you need around your business.”
There are “really only two levers” that businesses have to pull for survival, she added: efficiency, which is cost savings, and productivity, which generates revenue. Digital tools can help with both.
While many business owners are often absorbed in their day-to-day work, a good starting point for them is to identify their goals and “reverse engineer” from the pain points in their organisations, said Wines.
“Where am I seeing a lot of time wasted? Where am I seeing human error? And where am I seeing that I can’t get people to do the job? Those tend to be the three key areas where you might go,” she said.
“Technology continues to move. You have to keep going, and you have to build a change-ready organisation.”
Koren Wines, managing director of Xero Asia
This was the approach taken by traditional Chinese medicine specialist Oriental Remedies Group, said co-founder and chief executive officer Beatrice Liu, who was also a panellist.
The company “zoomed out” to look at the whole business and developed a five-year road map, then prioritised the digital tools it would need.
Liu highlighted two common challenges in digitalisation.
One is change management and not knowing how to cascade it down the organisation; the other is a lack of technical expertise.
Low acknowledged that many SMEs have said that they “don’t quite know where to start” in going digital. And even if they want to adopt digital tools, they are concerned that they lack employees with the technical skills.
“No worries. We do not expect our SMEs to internalise those skill sets or even resources,” she said, adding that this is especially true for micro SMEs.
This is why the government has set up 10 SME Centres with “an army of business advisers”.
“(They) can support you, based on the understanding of your business operation plans and strategy, and then they can choose the relevant digital tools and solutions in the SMEs Go Digital programme,” she said.
“We know that our SMEs will not have the resources to hire a CTO (chief technology officer), and that’s why we have CTO-as-a-Service,” she added, referring to the Infocomm Media Development Authority’s digital support platform.
Since its launch in April 2017, it has assisted 100,000 SMEs, Low said, with more than 40 per cent of them coming on board in the last four years.
Next wave: AI
In the next wave of digitalisation, generative artificial intelligence (AI) will be able to help small businesses overcome their constraints, especially manpower ones, she added.
She cited Crestar Fan Singapore, which uses an AI assistant for some customer support work such as distilling long e-mail threads. This freed up staff for strategic activities instead, she said.
Wines agreed that using AI is now a basic minimum. Even so-called agentic AI, which can help make decisions, is no longer “futuristic”, she added. With agentic AI, users can provide certain information and parameters, and get served suggested moves to meet desired outcomes.
The government is also keeping an eye on the ethics and safety surrounding the use of AI, Low said. The intention is to take a “pragmatic, substantive approach”.
“We believe that a trusted, vibrant and innovative AI ecosystem doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive – it can, in fact, be mutually reinforcing.”
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