Unbeknownst to many, Danone marked an important milestone on July 10 — the Danone Business Services (DBS) centre in Kuala Lumpur celebrated its first birthday.

The centre was opened without much fanfare, but make no mistake about the significance of this office in Danone’s plan to transform the way it works through achieving excellence in business worldwide and supporting its overall goal of “Bringing health through food to as many people as possible”.

The DBS Asia, which currently serves the global food giant’s markets in Greater China, North Asia and Oceania, India and Southeast Asia (excluding Indonesia), is one of three such centres across the world that centralises and standardises numerous end-to-end transactional and professional services such as finance, master data and employee services that used to be handled by individual countries or business units. It is an elegant and effective solution that gives the company economies of scale to undertake certain functions that were previously cost-prohibitive, such as hiring talent from consulting firms, and allows it to streamline operations and standards globally.

The journey towards this goal of service excellence began three years ago, says One DBS senior vice-president Francois-Xavier Lacroix. He was at the time, and still is today, responsible for establishing and leading the centres.

Key to the success of this DBS Asia centre were three pillars: hiring the right employees; setting up simplified standard operating procedures and key performance indicators (KPIs) that apply globally; and investing in cutting-edge technology, says Lacroix. Some tech-driven solutions include setting up a dashboard that tracks how KPIs across several areas are being met, enabling Danone to have an almost real-time view of how efficiently our processes and systems are running.

“The KPIs are calculated exactly the same way across all our centres, and we can compare our performance with the day before so we can see if we are progressing, and we can see how fast we go compared to the others, and this creates a bit of a challenge, a healthy internal competition with the right mindset obviously,” he explains.

Apart from Kuala Lumpur, the other offices are located in Mexico City, Mexico, which serves the Americas, and Warsaw in Poland, which covers Europe. Three offices were needed to ensure that all Danone business units, operating in different time zones, were adequately served.

Danone had several considerations in its search for the new DBS location, apart from time zones that could serve both Asian and Western markets.

Lacroix says Malaysia ticked many boxes on its checklist and offered good value compared with other locations in the region, such as Singapore and Vietnam.

For starters, Malaysia is an attractive location as it is right in the centre of Southeast Asia. This makes it a strategic gateway to the Asia-Pacific region, providing easy access to major markets and supply chains. In addition, the country operates in the GMT+8 time zone, making it conducive to working with both Asian and Western markets, facilitating real-time communication and collaboration.

A crucial component of DBS’ success is undoubtedly the people it hires. Lacroix says Malaysia also provided an abundance of skilled and highly educated talent, be they seasoned professionals or enthusiastic fresh graduates. “Malaysia has a large pool of highly skilled and educated professionals, particularly in fields like information technology, engineering, finance and business services. The country’s universities and technical institutions produce a steady stream of graduates equipped with relevant skills,” he notes.

Then there’s the fact that most Malaysians are trilingual and fluent in major languages used within the Asian region such as English, Malay, Mandarin and Tamil.

It helps that the Malaysian government also collaborates with industry players to offer training and upskilling programmes, ensuring that the workforce remains competitive and up to date with the latest industry trends and technologies.

Danone launched an extensive recruitment campaign, partnering with local recruitment agencies. The company prioritised hiring local talent, investing in training programmes to align new employees with its corporate values and operational standards. Danone is also building strategic relationships with universities to attract and develop fresh graduates.

Notably, the cost of living in Malaysia is lower than other regional hubs such as Singapore and Hong Kong, which makes it an attractive destination for corporations seeking to optimise costs. However, Lacroix is quick to emphasise that Danone is not seeking the cheapest place to operate — Malaysia had everything the company needed to start its DBS Asia with a high level of expertise at a competitive cost.

Further supporting this decision was Malaysia’s technological infrastructure, with recently ramped-up investments into digital infrastructure such as data centres and cloud computing facilities supporting advanced IT operations and data management requirements.

Danone also found that the country has robust laws and regulations in place to safeguard intellectual property rights, which gives corporations peace of mind that their innovations and technologies will be well protected. This is combined with the economic stability that is important for long-term business planning and investments.

The country also has a favourable economic climate for businesses such as tax breaks, investment grants and streamlined processes to set up businesses, which are facilitated by various governmental and regulatory agencies in Malaysia. It was a smooth and business-friendly process, ensuring that our set-up and operation are compliant with Malaysian laws at all times.

While it was not a prerequisite, it helped that Danone was already well established in Malaysia through its Dumex Dugro formulated milk powder which has been supporting childhood nutrition.

Kuala Lumpur’s DBS centre caters for the needs of markets that are multi-million-dollar businesses; thus, it needs to be staffed by top talents — and they, in turn, need good facilities, systems and policies that will support them in delivering their best work.

The 101,56 sq ft office at The Gardens South Tower in Mid Valley City was designed with that in mind. Built to accommodate up to 200 employees, the place sports Danone’s blue and white corporate colours and a wall where the company’s core “HOPE” values of “Humanism”, “Openness”, “Proximity” and “Enthusiasm” are proudly displayed. Meanwhile, a learning board celebrates employees who have completed different stages of their training programmes. The decor is accented with local flourishes such as batik artwork and native plants.

Its facilities include a town hall and learning area, ergonomic workstations, meeting spaces, a nursing room, a prayer room, an open pantry where tea is served daily, a game room and a quiet room where employees working late shifts to serve Western markets take re-energising naps.

There are also policies in place to enhance the working experience. DBS has a hybrid work arrangement where they come into the office two to three days a week to ensure that staff are able to bond and catch up with each other while maintaining their work-life balance.

Danone also holds several employee engagement activities, such as a global town hall, an annual recognition ceremony, festive celebrations, quarterly team-building exercises, a “Mini Olympics” sports day and badminton games.

To help their employees stay ahead, Danone supports their professional growth with training programmes.

“We are in FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) so we are used to being agile. The environment is moving quite fast, so obviously we need to work with our people to constantly maintain them at the right level of skill.

“DBS’ ambition is to be a technology centre where leading digital, automation and AI solutions will be the core to enabling our services; hence, the investment to develop advanced future skill sets for our team has been a priority.

“AI, data and digital, customer service mindset and process design are some of the skills we focus on. A clear DBS learning offer with easy access to online courses, virtual tutorials, a buddy programme, onboarding, Lean Six Sigma and Signature Danone Leadership development programmes provides rich resources for self-paced learning,” said Lacroix.

Lacroix is very proud of what his team in Asia has been able to achieve in the past three years. It is a superb team effort; from the start, they’ve worked with dedication and passion in a very collaborative spirit.

What’s next? Lacroix says they aim to grow the DBS team here to 200 staff by next year and expand its services to include even more technology solutions. Given Malaysia’s strong fundamentals, he believes that the Kuala Lumpur DBS Asia centre will continue to operate for a long time.