KUALA LUMPUR, 12 JANUARY 2010 – Government agencies MDeC and SME Corporation Malaysia have launched a new programme to help Malaysian SMEs move up the value chain.
Caretaker of the MSC [Multimedia Supercorridor] Malaysia initiative, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) chief executive officer, Dato’ Badlisham Ghazali said the collaboration with SME Corp. Malaysia would help enhance the competitiveness of Malaysian SMEs [small and medium enterprises].
“The MSC Malaysia SCORE+ programme benchmarks and propels the growth of Malaysian-Origin Global Icons,” said Badlisham.
“The programme will survey and benchmark participating MSC Malaysia Status SMEs in order to ease the necessary planning, business intelligence and decision-making process for developing and accruing assistance to the companies, while illuminating their competitiveness in a systematic framework,” he said.
An annual programme, the MSC Malaysia SCORE+ Programme is a framework which ties the two components together with additional ICT specific questions to further capture the fundamentals of what makes a company competitive. Upon completion of the survey, companies will receive a rating that describes the current state of the company’s growth and competitiveness, ranging from 1 Star to 5 Stars, with the latter being the best.
SMEs need to enhance core competencies
Badlisham said the SCORE+ programme was developed with two goals in mind. “To act as a score card and survey for local MSC Malaysia Status companies that will increase their effectiveness and competitiveness in the global marketplace as well as to create a uniform rating and profiling system that can be shared across multiple levels of industry.”
“Moving companies up the value chain means having to efficiently and critically analyse companies and determine their performance holistically, and not to be solely judged by their financial performance,” he said.
“This can be best achieved by looking at organisational strengths, efficiency, robustness and having the basic certifications and standards that are necessary and in place,” Badlisham. “All these measures are built into the SCORE+ Programme, as it seeks to measure these parameters as a benchmark across the over 1,700 active MSC Malaysia Status companies.”
“Through this partnership, we have recognised that SMEs need to nurture and enhance their core competencies, such as process and product engineering, as well as adopting information technology (IT) in order to meet international standards on quality and delivery,” said SME Corp. Malaysia chief executive officer, Dato’ Hafsah Hashim. “In this day and age, SMEs must cater to a global market and diversify into high-tech products and services with better prospects for growth.”
