HOME MONDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2014 Professional consulting services, which the Economic Development Board is nurturing, is a key sector that supports firms here in making critical business decisions. MARRYING a business consultant can be dangerous. Just ask Mr Thongchie Shang, associate principal at McKinsey Singapore. His wife of four years spent close to a decade in the consulting business before moving to a different job. “The good thing is that she understands what I do. The bad thing is that our date nights sometimes turn into mini-consulting engagements. “Our entire conversation on one Valentine’s Day was about how to improve the restaurant’s operations and revenue,” the 36-year-old recalls with a laugh. Beyond his primary focus on financial institutions, he has taken a strong interest in working with Singapore companies across all industries in the five years he has spent with the United Statesbased global management consulting firm. One of his first projects with McKinsey involved helping a beleaguered local hospital, which was making headlines for its long waiting times. “The management wanted to invest in new buildings, new equipment and more doctors. “It would have taken years and millions of dollars before the problem was solved that way,” he recalls, adding that McKinsey’s stop-gap solution was far simpler. It was to sort out the mismatch between doctors’ schedules and patients’ needs. “The problem was reduced significantly with a simple Excel worksheet and some forward planning. The hospital implemented it within a month, and waiting times dropped,” he says. He finds such projects especially fulfilling because he is making a difference in his own backyard, he adds. It has good prospects on a global level for people from diverse backgrounds. In the fourth of a seven-part series, Arti Mulchand talks to three people working in the sector. Making a difference in his own backyard McKinsey Singapore associate principal Thongchie Shang has taken a strong interest in working with Singapore firms across all sectors in the five years he has been with the firm. “I like helping to make Singapore a better place, and that makes my work a lot more meaningful,” he says. PHOTOS: DESMOND LUI FOR THE STRAITS TIMES Mr Shang is a President’s Scholar who for 10 years worked in the Administrative Service, including the Foreign Affairs and Transport ministries. “I like helping to make Singapore a better place, and that makes my work a lot more meaningful. It must be the former civil servant in me,” he says. He also loves the fact that these are changing times for the sector, with increasing demands being placed on consulting firms. “The depth of expertise that clients look for is increasing every year. It’s no longer enough to be a ‘smart generalist’,” he says. Among his current projects is a recently completed survey of 30,000 banking customers across Her work often requires her to pack a suitcase AS A manager with A.T. Kearney, a global management consulting firm with offices all over the world, Ms Lindy Foo has a longer commute to work than most. She is with the firm’s strategic operations practice and, early each Monday morning, she grabs her laptop and a carry-on suitcase to catch a flight to wherever her current client’s office is. From now till January, that happens to be in Hong Kong, where the office is a 15-minute walk from her hotel-home from Mondays to Fridays. As the Hong Kong project is a long one, she has a second suitcase of essentials kept at the hotel over the weekends, when she returns to Singapore. “That’s easier than lugging everything around,” explains the 30-year-old, whose work has taken her to 10 countries in the past eight years. She has also learnt to make the most of her time on the road. She catches up with work in cabs and airports as well as on flights. As her investment banker husband travels almost as much, weekends are sacred, she says. “I keep Saturdays completely work free unless there is a critical situation,” she says. But there is an upside to all that travel: “You get exposed to different people, cultures and experiences, and learn new things every day.” Being based in a client’s office is also a plus, she says, explaining that being able to observe human and business-unit dynamics helps her to make better judgments. Her projects are wide ranging, involving anything from looking at a company’s growth strategies or its manufacturing network to handling merger issues. As a consultant, she brings neutrality and perspective to the table. “We also save our clients time because we know what works, what could happen and what to expect,” she says. 13 Asian countries about digital banking. A report will be published at the end of the year. He says: “Projects like these help to seal Singapore’s role as a hub for consumer insights across Asia.” JOB PERK When a client sees the value you bring and recognises the difference you make, it makes up for everything. There aren’t many other jobs that let you have that kind of an effect on a company and its future. – Ms Lindy Foo, saying there is satisfaction in working in an industry that she feels really has a far-reaching impact Ms Lindy Foo’s projects involve anything from looking at a company’s growth strategies to handling merger issues. Ms Foo, who got her degree in Business Administration from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2006, fell in love with numbers as a child. When she graduated, consulting seemed a natural choice. She moved up the ranks at A.T. Kearney, and became an associate in 2011. At the start of this year, she moved into her current role, which also includes overseeing the work of other consultants. It can mean having to get up to speed on new industries in just days, which is “a steep learning curve”, she says. But there is satisfaction in working in an industry she feels really has a far-reaching impact. “When a client sees the value you bring and recognises the difference you make, it makes up for everything. There aren’t many other jobs that let you have that kind of an effect on a company and its future.” Forecasts possible for everything but marriage A STRESS fracture sustained in 2005 while doing national service ended Mr Brian Ho’s dream of becoming an officer, but being medically downgraded to doing administrative work led him to a different destiny – predicting the future. A book about actuarial science drew him into a world where his task was to figure out the likelihood of a particular event happening, helping to decrease the odds that something undesirable would happen, and minimising the financial impact of unfavourable events on companies such as insurers. “I thought it was an interesting mix of mathematics and business savvy, and decided it was for me,” says the 28-year-old senior associate with Deloitte Analytics. Actuaries can help an insurance company decide what premium to charge, given information about the insured, or help a firm figure out how much to pay for fire insurance, factoring in the nature of the business and even how often the firm holds fire drills. It is a niche area, and only a handful in Mr Ho’s cohort at Nanyang Business School ventured into this world of measuring and managing risk. He worked with a reinsurer for two years after graduating in 2010, building “catastrophe models” to measure and mitigate risk. One model became a reality when, in 2011, a 9.0-magnitude Tohoku earthquake hit Fukushima, affecting several clients. However, Mr Ho was convinced that his skills could find a broader application so, in 2012, he moved to Deloitte, one of the Big 4 accounting houses. There, he found a rewarding future in forecasting for industries such as finance and health care. His projects included working B5 It takes both business savvy and a knack for numbers to formulate accurate projections from complex data, says Deloitte Analytics senior associate Brian Ho. out whether automation could help reduce waiting times at a hospital pharmacy. While doing the number-crunching, his team worked closely with pharmacists and the hospital to understand the limitations of what could be done. “We needed to ask what the numbers really meant and how they would affect people. The eventual solution helped cut waiting time to less than 15 minutes on any given day,” he recalls. At the moment, his skills are being put to a different kind of test as he prepares to marry his girlfriend of five years. His Excel worksheets can track budgets and table assignments, and Tumblr takes care of RSVPs, but can he forecast if his marriage will be a happily ever after? He replies with a laugh: “I think there are too many unknowns in that equation. That, I have to leave to fate.” Rise of professional services sector PULL up an alumni page of the world’s largest consulting companies, and it will read like a who’s who of the business world. Alumni from consulting groups such as McKinsey & Company and the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), for instance, occupy top spots in companies like Boeing and General Electric. In fact, Singapore Post group CEO Wolfgang Baier spent a decade with McKinsey & Company in Europe and Asia, leading the postal and logistics practice as well as operations activities in South-east Asia. McKinsey is among the “Big 3” strategy houses that have a strong presence in Singapore, alongside Bain & Company and the BCG. Also here are the “Big 4” accounting houses – Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), KPMG and Ernst & Young – and both mid-sized and boutique consulting firms, including Roland Berger, A.T. Kearney and Simon-Kucher & Partners. Together, they make up Singapore’s growing professional services sector, providing strategy, accounting, legal, advertising and human resource consulting to companies spanning health care and consumer to energy and manufacturing. As such companies seek to explore Asia’s growth opportunities while negotiating its unique challenges and complexities, the professional services sector plays a growing role, says Mr Kelvin Wong, assistant managing director at the Economic Development Board (EDB). “Business leaders increasingly seek sophisticated professional services and partners who can advise and help chart their regional strategies.” This demand has helped drive growth within the industry, creating new and exciting job opportunities, with consulting firms turning to both local undergraduates and industry experts with deep subject-matter knowledge to bolster their teams. With the support of the EDB, many of the larger firms are also creating Singapore-based centres of excellence, where they can cultivate subject-matter expertise in key areas. This broadens the range of job possibilities, says Mr Wong. Just last month, the three-year-old McKinsey Innovation Campus, a partnership with the EDB that centralises its regional knowledge teams for several areas here, opened its first productivity hub the McKinsey Productivity Sciences Centre. It will provide research, benchmarking tools and technology-based solutions to drive productivity in the manufacturing, retail and food sectors. The BCG has a similar knowledge hub – its Centre for Business Excellence – which includes the BCG Leadership and Talent Enablement Centre, which helps companies plan their leadership and talent pipelines. The large accounting firms are also developing similar capabilities in centres such as the KPMG Centre of Excellence and the PwC Growth Markets Centre. Ultimately, this all leads to the creation of wellpaying jobs, as well as the opportunity to interact with head honchos from leading global and regional companies and to play a key role in developing their businesses, says Mr Wong. “Consultants are given the opportunity to create and implement solutions that will have lasting impact on the world.”