Dassault Systèmes Asia Pacific South Partner Spotlight – Shabudin Md Saman

In the third interview of Dassault Systèmes’ Asia Pacific South (APS) Partner Spotlight Series 2021, which highlights business owners from our Customer Process Experience partner community, we speak to Shabudin Md Saman, Managing Director of Feiran Technology Sdn Bhd in Malaysia.

Feiran Technology is a market leader in innovation and high-tech engineering consulting, providing services that cover every stage of project development, from strategic planning through to manufacturing, to key players in the Aerospace, Automotive, Energy, Railway, Finance, Healthcare and Telecom sectors. The company offers technological know-how in areas such as Intelligent Systems, Innovative Product Development, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), and Information Systems.

In this interview, Shabudin shares the company’s challenges and experience in reaching out and engaging with their customers during the pandemic. He also talks about Feiran Technology’s longer-term ambition to be a key player in driving Malaysia’s national digitalization initiative.

1. What is the role of Marketing in Feiran Technology’s business strategy?

Marketing is always been an integral part of Feiran Technology’s operations. However, during current hard times, Marketing has become even more vital in helping to maintain and enhance Feiran Technology’s presence and visibility in our user communities, as well as to reach out to all other potential customers out there.

With shrinking success rates in deal closures, we need Marketing more than ever to ensure and enlarge our sales funnels.

1. How has Feiran Technology changed the way they communicate and engage with customers?

Initially, like everyone else, we did not know how bad and how long the crisis was going to be. It took awhile before our customers became accustomed to the new normal of working from home.

We took the opportunity to help enhance our customers enhance their knowledge and capabilities in using our products through online training sessions and webinars by Dassault Systèmes’ technical consultants.

1. What are Feiran Technology’s growth plans in the New Normal?

In the middle of 2019, we started to target the Oil & Gas industry. The Automotive and Aerospace industries have always been our “bread and butter” markets and we will continue to build on our strengths. But now, we are planning to go into Oil & Gas in a big way.

We have seen some success at the beginning of 2020 in expanding our reach to the Oil & Gas industry. We organized a lot of online knowledge-sharing sessions with target customers during the pandemic and have actually increased our potential customer base and opportunity pipeline, which we will focus on. I can see Oil & Gas contributing quite a big portion to our revenue in the next two to three years.

1. What’s next for Feiran Technology in 2021 and beyond?

The other thing we are looking at is to ride the “wave” that the Malaysian government is going into – which is digitalization. Dassault Systèmes has a lot of solutions that can help with this initiative. At Feiran Technology, together with the team from Dassault Systèmes, we would like to make sure that we will spearhead Malaysia’s digitalization initiative and also be the leader in ensuring that the Government of Malaysia achieves what it’s targeting with “Malaysia 5.0”*.

* Malaysia 5.0 is an ambition by the Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) to firmly establish Malaysia as the Heart of Digital ASEAN by addressing digital accessibility, financial Inclusion, productivity and growth through the tools of Industry 4.0 such as fintech, blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI). The objective is to develop a digital economy that will contribute towards a more sustainable and circular economy, ensuring greater well-being for all citizens, regardless of age, ethnicity and class. For more information, go to https://mdec.my/news/malaysia-5-0-ready-to-reinvent-malaysia-digital-economy/

You can view Shabudin’s interview in the following video.