Why Indonesia? Made up of a chain of thousands of islands between Asia and Australia, Indonesia is the world's largest archipelagic state, and has one of the densest population with a young workforce. Half of its total population is below the age of 30 years. Indonesia is the largest economy in Southeast Asia and is part of the G20 group of the world's richest nations.
The Indonesian government launched its Indonesia 4.0 Roadmap in 2018, part of efforts to make Indonesia one of the top 10 largest economies in the world by 2030. Even so, the country faces social challenges such as access to education and rising inequality, lax enforcement, and the need for infrastructure development is high.
The purpose of this course is to provide participants with an appreciation of business and investment opportunities in Indonesia, and an understanding of its social, cultural, economic, and political landscape.
At the same time, this is an SMU-XO module, which offers an overseas experiential learning opportunity for students. The course allows students to translate classroom knowledge and theory into practical solutions for real organizations. In addition to visits to companies and organizations, student will also participate in a consultancy project. Through the project, students will learn how to solve business problems with guidance from the faculty and project sponsor mentors, from problem definition to final client presentation - while simultaneously testing their skills in real world settings.
The project will focus on evaluating problems faced by the accounting/finance and other functions of one company in Indonesia and recommending/applying solutions to these problems. The course qualifies for one credit unit and encompasses seminars, guest lectures and presentations all held in Singapore.
Grading is on a Pass/Fail basis
At the end of the course, participants are expected to:
- Develop a better understanding of the Indonesia economy, key industries (especially technology related, financial and banking sectors, capital market, and regulatory and tax regime.
- Gain an insight into business and investment opportunities in Indonesia.
- Solve real-world business problems through a student consultancy project.
- Learn how to handle uncertainty in project groups.
- Develop networking, and other life skills by interacting with business leaders.
Students conceptualised a real-time (with monthly updates) employee performance tracking tool across the 6 different functions. The output was in the form of a dashboard designed using visualization software, which provided insight for top management to encourage and reward efficient behavior and top performers.
To facilitate better decision-making in the Business Banking Sales Performance Management, students designed a dashboard analysis for their senior management, provided a benchmark scorecard model from other emerging business banks, and proposed a new KPI model that is more encouraging, more achievable and more effective for sales people to achieve bank targets.
To digitally transform the business of their wholesale banking services, students conducted cross-comparison studies on the cutting-edge practices in digital transformation done by banks around the world (including Asia) on wholesale banking. In addition, students explored the accounting implications of having more developed systems, and devised feasible recommendations on what they could or should do in terms of digital transformation for the wholesale banking division.
Students provided perspectives on how to penetrate the education industry even further with the end goal of increasing customer base as well as creating stickiness. In addtion, students proposed business plans on how the project organisation could penetrate the education industry even further by penetrating its customer's supply chains and ecosystem, both from retail and business perspectives.