- ‘Whoever wins in AI, wins the whole cake’
- CoE focused on digital skills, talent development, performance to build trust
Chin Hin Group Bhd has been a Malaysian success story, starting with its roots as a small hardware store in 1974 in the sleepy northern city of Alor Star, Kedah and growing over the past 51 years into a RM3.25 billion revenue company rooted in building materials, construction engineering, property, and home living with a presence in 13 countries.
All this and more can be gleaned from its annual reports from since it was listed on Bursa Malaysia in 2017.
What is not obvious when you step into its new twin-blocks 27-story Kuala Lumpur headquarters today, is of a company that has been quietly undergoing a bold and wide-ranging transformation since before the pandemic but that ratcheted up the pace of its digital transformation from 2022, convinced that tomorrow’s winners will be those who can combine legacy strengths with digital capabilities.
At the heart of this reinvention is a strategy powered by artificial intelligence (AI), and a reimagined approach to human capital, led by Abel Saw its Chief Digital Transformation Officer, who first impressed Chin Hin leadership with his level-headed approach as one of its vendors since 2019, before Chiau Haw Choon, the group managing director, made a majority investment into a new startup with Abel as a way to bring him fully onboard at Chin Hin in mid-2022.
This marked an acceleration in its strategy to adopt tech into its very brick and mortar business guided by a very practical approach. “Our tech unit leads off any request for help from the various business units with the question, ‘Is this a tech-to-win or tech-to-enable request?’”
Key difference between ‘tech-to-win’ and ‘tech-to-enable’
There is a key difference here, explains Abel.
“Tech-to-win means the business units want to use it to gain a clear edge over competitors. The KPI is straightforward. It’s about revenue, growth, impact. If it helps us win, we move fast to help the business units.”
He points out that even Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which is often seen as back-office infrastructure, can be repositioned as a ‘win’ technology when paired with AI agents.
“In a B2B business, quotations are critical. With 10 business units and 10,000 products, Chin Hin sales execs used to dig through catalogues and manuals to find the right information for potential clients. Now, they can just ask the AI agents and get an instant answer. That kind of speed gives us a real edge.”
By contrast, tech-to-enable focuses on modernizing processes, systems, and data. It covers the fundamentals like HR, finance, and shared services that keep the company running. “This is where efficiency and productivity matter,” Abel says. “Microsoft’s ecosystem such as Office, Teams, SharePoint falls into this category. These tools serve 80% of our people. We run training on prompt engineering, AI in Teams, and better ways to use SharePoint.”
While it is a big user of Microsoft products, to the extent that a senior Microsoft exec from the region suggested to Abel that Chin Hin was a “frontier company” (more on this later), interestingly, Chin Hin does not just benchmark against local competitors or look to long established tech vendors when looking for software solutions.
When choosing a Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) for its property division, Chin Hin looked beyond the established vendors and ended up choosing a Chinese built CRM that property developers there are using.
The ongoing property slump in China since 2022 has intensified competition between developers where sales leads are monitored and nurtured with a granularity and aggressiveness that is not practised in Malaysia where the property market is still good.
“To deploy tech-to-win, you need agility and sometimes you have to take risks (use software that is not well known),” Abel said.
Building the foundation: Chin Hin’s Centre of Excellence
For a group as diversified as Chin Hin, digital transformation could not begin with technology alone. It had to start with people. The group needed a way to support, develop, and empower its estimated 3,000 workforce at scale.
This focus on people led to the creation of Chin Hin’s Centre of Excellence (CoE), a hub designed to modernize HR, align talent development with business priorities, and embed a culture of continuous learning. “The CoE is not just an administrative function. It’s where we rethink how HR adds value to the business,” Abel explained.
Beyond digitizing payroll and employee records, the CoE leverages analytics to track productivity and engagement, introduces talent review councils to guide succession planning, and positions HR as a strategic partner in the boardroom. “In the past, HR was about processing payroll. Today, it’s also about identifying critical roles and deciding whether to develop talent from within or bring it in from outside,” Abel notes.
Central to Chin Hin’s digital shift is reskilling and upskilling is a partnership with Microsoft, where Chin Hin has reimagined training so employees can quickly adapt to new tools, with Copilot playing a key role.
“Copilot is now central to how we train our people. More than 1,500 badges have already been earned by our staff,” Abel says. Badges are the way Microsoft encourages and rewards users who undergo its various Copilot modules, serving as an indication of a person’s skills set within the Microsoft 365 productivity ecosystem.
But Chin Hin didn’t start off by using existing modules.
In late 2024 Abel’s team went through between 60 to 70 Copilot modules first and crafted its own 2-hour program suitable for Chin Hin with three badges awarded upon completion.
The voluntary program saw around 400 staff complete it from the 2,000 who have access to Microsoft license and its productivity tools.
Helping staff maximise the tools, the digital transformation team runs what it calls “discovery workshops”, designed to help pinpoint repetitive tasks that consume up to 70% of the HR and admin teams’ time. “Those insights then guide where we deploy autonomous AI agents, so staff spend less time on routine work and more on higher-value contributions,” Abel explains.
Design thinking is also part of how the company plans change with design thinking workshops becoming part of the annual strategy process, giving employees a chance to map out real pain points, especially repetitive tasks that slow them down. “Not every project needs it,” Abel said. “But for operations, these workshops surface insights you wouldn’t get otherwise.”
Why Trust Determines Success
Abel is quick to point out that technology alone doesn’t guarantee success and that many transformations fail because they don’t have legs (buy-in from staff).
“Most transformation programs focus on change management, but change without trust rarely lasts,” Abel reflects. “Many believe technology is the hardest part of any digital transformation, but it’s really about people. And if you think about it, people are also the simplest to deal with. They respond to trust, clarity, and support.”
“Trust isn’t about how long you’ve known someone,” he explains. “It’s about how many challenges you’ve faced together and whether you’ve come out stronger. You could know someone for just six months, but if they’ve helped you overcome hurdles, that builds trust,” he said explaining how his digital transformation team works within the company.
Abel points out that many organizations confuse deployment with success. A system is either usable or it’s not. What really matters is adoption. “Without adoption, there’s no usage. Without usage, there’s no satisfaction. And without satisfaction, trust can’t be built.”
That’s why Chin Hin didn’t rush into building a shared services model with functions like HR, Finance, IT centralized to serve the entire organization. Instead, the group started with the CoE focused on digital skills, talent development, and performance. “If you start with shared services, staff may not trust you. We decided to build the CoE first because it shows we care about people’s growth and performance. Once they trust that, you can roll out shared services,” Abel explains.
The approach has already earned recognition, with the group winning the 2024 HR Asia Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion award for smart workplace transformation.
Betting on Speed
In August 2024, Chin Hin announced a partnership with Kingdee International Software Group, China’s leading Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) ERP vendor. The collaboration integrates finance, procurement, supply chain, and front-end operations into a single AI-powered management platform.
This was not a matter of picking a value-for-money software. Rather, before finalizing the partnership, Chin Hin’s top executives from six business units, and including the respective CFOs spent a week in China visiting no less than six Kingdee client sites. “We wanted to see for ourselves how it operates on the ground,” Abel said. The involvement of senior management underscored how critical digital transformation is to the company’s future.
Another signal is that Chin Hin invests RM20–RM30 million annually in its ERP platform, excluding private cloud costs. While SAP remains the global standard for stability, Chin Hin chose Kingdee for its speed and AI capabilities. “China is way ahead in terms of AI application and iteration,” Abel notes. “We’re betting on their speed.”
The company’s growing commitment to technology is reflected in its budget. “Our annual IT budget has increased by 300% from 2022 to 2024. That shows how serious the company is about technology now,” Abel says. “Previously, IT was more like a support department. Today, it’s a core strategic function. That’s why you see the budget jump so significantly.”
Turning Data into Business Value
Looking ahead, Abel, nor surprisingly, sees AI as the ultimate game-changer. “Whoever wins AI wins the whole cake,” he said. He envisions ERP systems evolving beyond screens and clicks to conversational AI interfaces: “It’s hard to imagine that in the future you’ll still need to navigate an ERP menu. You’ll just prompt, ‘Generate this report,’ and it appears.”
In a world where AI develops faster than traditional product cycles, Abel believes the distinction between “traditional” and “digital” companies no longer matters. “At the end of the day, what counts is who can turn data and AI into real business value.”
And Chin Hin Group is working to ensure it emerges a winner.
