Weekly Brief

There is More to IT Assets than just ROI

Chatchai Suthapakti, Director of Information Technology, Thairung Partners Group

Chatchai Suthapakti, Director of Information Technology, Thairung Partners Group

Having started his career as an IT Assistant Supervisor in TOA Paints, Chatchai Suthapakti has garnered 20 years' worth of IT & Digital Transformation expertise. As Director of Information Technology in Thairung Partners Group, he utilizes his knowledge to create and lead all of the company's digital projects towards transforming the organization's human operations into an automation process to improve Thairung's customer experience and explore new business opportunities.

In an interview with CIOReview, Chatchai explains how Thairung Partners Group handles IT Asset Disposition and why entrepreneurs should look beyond Return on Investment(ROI) while acquiring a digital solution.

Can you tell our readers about Thairung Partners Group and your role in the company?

I am acting as the IT Director from The Thairung Partners Group. Our main business is providing rental cars to customers. We have car dealerships in Mazda, Lexus, and Nissan automobiles. We also have a spare part dealer and a security service. Another pillar of our business is property. We have 20 hotels all around Thailand.

I take care of the IT department and provide centralized support to our business unit from the IT and digital perspectives.

"Entrepreneurs need to experiment with technologies without thinking much of ROI. Where outcomes of successful experiments are good, we can learn from failed ones as well."

What challenges did you face after joining Thairung Partners Group regarding IT Asset Disposition(ITAD), and how did you tackle them?

I joined the company two years ago and found that they had many problems with their manual process. They were having problems conducting analytics and had a lot of delays in operations due to the paperwork involved. So, the first thing I did was transform all the paperwork into digitalization.

Can you tell our readers about the different IT trends that Thairung Partners Group implemented to improve their business process and customer experience?

After the initial digitalization of our business operations was successful, we deployed about thirty applications to support further internal processes and customer experience. In addition, we implemented the low-code platform, which saved our software product development time by at least half the previous duration. The low code helped improve our product life cycle in every environment, be it dev, test, production, or cybersecurity. It also helped us implement Agile methodologies in our process easily and efficiently.

What advice would you like to share with the budding and future entrepreneur within your line of work?

From last year, I observed that when modern entrepreneurs look for a digital solution, they always think about Return on Investment(ROI). So if you talk about digital investment, you can look at ROI from two perspectives:

The first perspective is that even though digital transformation is essential to pull off, it causes little impact on the actual business performance. The second perception is that anything can be reviewed in the market. Any product or technology can be rated good or bad. For example, since Cloud computing technology has been active in the market for nearly a decade, it is a good technology. However, the question to ask is not what ROI a company can get off of the cloud but how to take advantage of it and improve one's business performance.

Entrepreneurs need to experiment with technologies without thinking much of ROI. While outcomes of successful experiments are good, we can learn from failed ones as well.

What is the future roadmap of Thairung Partners Group in terms of ITAD?

We have four missions for IT and Digital Transformation. We will increase our business operation speed in the first mission by implementing a lean and automated process. We want to keep improving customer experience through our digital projects for the second one. The third is training on leveraging data integration into our business strategies. The fourth mission, which we have already deployed, is learning whether our digital solution is faster than our competitors. Then, we can copy that solution into our similar businesses to stay ahead in the market. To that end, we can even try to convert our competitors into our customers. This approach can generate great opportunities.