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| Eyeing efficiencies though a regional hub ( 15/10/2002 ) | |||||||||
B&L's vice-president for information management and technology in Asia, David Lam Tak-cheong, said the move "has greatly enhanced our productivity and operational efficiency. It has also given us higher flexibility in system upgrades and expansion". Mr Lam added: "The telecommunication infrastructure and software technology in Hong Kong enables more companies to develop their regional hubs here. There is ample supply of logistics expertise in the Hong Kong market." The consolidation of the company's IT operations in Hong Kong, involving 11 Asian markets, has been moving ahead of schedule. B&L's Asian Computing Centre in Hong Kong now "processes the general ledger, accounts payables and procurement transactions for all our Asian business units", according to Mr Lam. The company has also established an Asian Distribution Centre in Hong Kong. Mr Lam described this as "a regional warehouse to accommodate all the non-core inventory items for online customer order fulfillment for all of B&L's Asian markets". The backbone of this consolidation process has been provided by IBM's enterprise computing systems and services. The migration to a new system at its Hong Kong hub resolved the problem posed by B&L's complex and high-cost Asia-wide IT infrastructure, whereby each of those markets managed their own finances and inventory with separate servers and software applications. The success of the move has convinced the company to accelerate the consolidation of all regional countrywide systems and shift corporate information to its regional data centre by using IBM's mainframe-class i830 enterprise server. The Hong Kong hub concept has begun to positively impact B&L's bottom line, with Asia emerging as B&L's fastest-growing regional operation. Spurred by increasing sales for its eye care products on the Chinese mainland and India, B&L's first-half sales this year totalled HK$6,788 million (US$872.6 million), a rise of 9 per cent over the same period last year. Related links: | |||||||||
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