To be a successful business leader, this person must have a clear and strong vision that he/she firmly believes. The journey of a business leader is filled with endless challenges and his/her strong belief in the vision will be the guiding beacon that provides bearing for his/her journey. This business leader will need to be able to attract and harness the capability of a team to work together to realize the vision. This requires the ability to understand the team members’ strengths and weaknesses, to build and maximize their strengths and to complement the weaknesses. One such leader is Desmond Tay, CEO of vCargo Cloud (VCC), who believes “A successful business is not measured only by profit and revenue. It has to, in some ways, contribute to make the world a better place from the products and services it offers. If the business leader is able to steer his business to achieve that, then I think the business is successful.”
Desmond states that the company started with a grand vision to change global trade through digitalization. To accomplish this vision, the company needs to be a leader in the transformation of the trade ecosystem, a thought leader in the field of digital technology and most important of all, visionary leadership in the organization to motivate a pool of talents to achieve the company’s goals. Further, the company’s success is not achieved through a single leader, but a core leadership team in VCC. He is glad that, over the years, he has been able to build this core team to walk the journey with him.
As one of the co-founders of the company, Desmond believes that with the growth in trade volume, it is inevitable that companies are required to perform import and export operations in a variety of legal and regulatory environments around the world. As international trade continues to grow, businesses are facing challenges as trade processes are inherently complicated and complex and are heavily Desmond shared a few of the challenges faced in the logistics and supply chain industry. Firstly, the systems used in the industry are isolated and do not support national or international data format standards, which makes these systems unable to work and interface with the outside world effectively.
Secondly, import and export rules from customs are complex and differ in different countries. This makes trade processes complex in nature, so it is unlikely that the users are familiar with trade processes and regulations of all countries. Because of this unfamiliarity, traders often shy away from trading in countries they are not familiar with. Thirdly, logistics processes are quite tedious and laborious as a lot of information has to be exchanged, in a specific chronological sequence, along with many different sets of documentation. Lastly, many in the industry do not have the right knowledge and the resources to splurge on experimenting with new technologies. Hence, they are stuck with dated and old technologies.
Realizing these challenges faced by the industry, VCC, a leading Infocomm Technology (ICT) solution and service provider, understands the importance of effective management of trade processes through digitalization. A robust supply chain enables companies to ensure that their goods are efficiently ordered, shipped, and paid while complying with regulatory requirements and supporting trade security.
By embracing the “Buy-Ship-Pay” model, VCC offers a range of trade-related solutions to digitalize the entire end-toend process for trade and supply chain. The company’s integrated platform, TM CamelONE , provides a suite of interconnected modules that simplifies global trade complexity for businesses and governments by creating an ecosystem that connects stakeholders in the trade compliance, cross-border logistics, and trade financing sector.
Users can select these services according to their business needs. CamelONE helps users overcome trade processes and complex trade rules, to trade without having to know all the trade details. For example, they can get freight forwarding service by stating their requirements and following a simple process, without needing to understand how the process works exactly. The same goes for other complicated tasks such as permit preparation, submission and clearance, preparation and submission of Certificate of Origin (CO), trade financing, and more. And since CamelONE is a cloud-based solution, users enjoy the benefit of having continual technological refresh whenever new functions and technologies are added to CamelONE.
Desmond sees himself continuing to lead the team in VCC in the foreseeable future to achieve their goals. VCC is a technology company, and it is in its employees’ blood to embrace new technology. The influential culture of keeping an open mind, be connected to the world and the courage to try new things will ensure VCC is always ahead of its competition.
