Shah Alam – On January 16th 2021, a group of final year MBA students from the executive mode (AA701B) organized a webinar titled Enduring Challenges in the New Decade: Is the Current Global Scenario Driving or Limiting the Business Potential. This webinar was part of MGT786 Global Business Strategy course assessment. The first invited speaker was Mr. Aidi Izham, the Executive Director/ Chief Executive of Raiz Malaysia, a subsidiary of Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB). He gave a recollection of Raiz’s journey from its inception to where it is at the moment, renowned as one of the pioneers in FinTech Industry. Mr. Aidi gave an outline of Raiz’s resilience business model which is believed to keep stimulating the growth of its business despite the current global scenario. Raiz’s sustainability depends on the sale of a variety of products such as Raiz Kids, its collaboration with all banking institutions and global portfolio expansion – all of which will become its future- proof strategy whilst leveraging on robo-advisory and AI to achieve its operational excellence.

The webinar session continued with a sharing on the F&B industry by Mr. Ahmad Zaki, the second guest speaker. Mr Ahmad Zaki is the Owner/ Founder of Samurai Yakiniku Setia Alam. As a restaurant which serves wagyu and beef as the main dishes, Samurai Yakiniku has been facing challenges due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the ‘meat cartel’ scandal recently. Ahmad Zaki in his session stated that 5 important strategies are the key success factors for Samurai Yakiniku in enduring all the challenges. According to him, a non-disruptive supply chain management will only happen with good collaboration with the supplier. F&B industry also has to adapt to changes and leverage on mobile application technology as a distribution channel. He also mentioned that Samurai Yakiniku has a variety of product offerings even though the signature dishes are wagyu and beef. As a strategy to regain trust from customers, Ahmad Zaki worked on celebrity endorsement strategy where a collaboration was initiated with Islamic Scholars and Celebrities to educate customer about the halal issues. He also shared with 90 audiences about Kanban and Point-of-sale (POS) inventory systems as the processes that were adopted by his company to achieve operational excellence.

In the closing session, Dr. Ainul Azreen Adam, the course instructor and project advisor highlighted the needs of business model recalibration among all industry players to ensure sustainability and resilience in this decade.