The purpose of this course is to provide participants with an appreciation of business and investment opportunities in an Asian country, 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 an Asian country and recommending/applying solutions to these problems.
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.