ST Engineering Annual Report 2020

CORPORATE OVERVI EW PERFORMANCE REVI EW SUSTAINABI L ITY CORPORATE GOVERNANCE F INANCIAL REPORT Q/ How will ST Engineering pursue operational excellence in these challenging times? We will continue to push for greater innovation in our products and services offerings, as well as more improvements in our operational processes. No processes will be too small to improve upon. If there are practices that could hinder our work in any way or prevent us from delivering maximum value to meet our customers’ needs, we will look into improving them. Such a commitment requires constant efforts by all parties involved in operations to work as a team in identifying and preserving best practices. At the same time, we need to keep an open mind, and be receptive towards adopting new practices that can help us to be more efficient in delivering better products and services. We pursue operational excellence in challenging times, and in good times. While the prevalent climate may seemingly make operational excellence an important priority, keeping our operations lean and efficient at all times is analogous to constantly maintaining one’s health and fitness level so that we can have the stamina and strength to cope with any sickness or infection. Operational excellence is hence a never-ending journey, which requires an organisation to have unwavering drive and self-motivation, as opposed to reacting only to external conditions. I believe what we have achieved thus far has been made possible by the drive and passion of our people. We will therefore continue to work towards motivating our employees and instilling in them, the culture of operational excellence. This applies not only to frontline staff involved in designing products or solving technical problems, but also to our backend staff supporting business operations. In addition, we will equip our employees with the necessary tools, such as Continuous Improvement techniques and toolkits, to propagate a harmonised framework of achieving operational excellence in a systematic way. These toolkits will also allow employees to better communicate among themselves, define problems, develop solutions and measure outcomes consistently. Among the many measurements of operational excellence, safety will be one that we will place great emphasis on as we work towards a target of zero workplace accidents. Q/ The aviation industry is going through tough times. Is this the worst you’ve experienced? In your role as Chief Commercial Officer, how will you guide the commercial aerospace business? Compared to the September 11 attack in 2001 which had also caused a steep decline in air traffic, the COVID-19 pandemic cuts much deeper. Hopefully with progressive vaccine rollouts, recovery for the aviation industry will not take as long as it had with September 11. At the onset of the pandemic, our immediate action was to safeguard the health of our workforce by implementing safe management measures at our various worksites. To mitigate impact from a drastic drop in work volume resulting from plunging air travel activities, we significantly cut back discretionary spending and rightsized our capacity in accordance with demand. To rally our employees behind these efforts, the management maintained open and constant staff communications, and took the lead in taking a pay cut. All these were done as we stepped up on serving our customers with value-added ideas. Looking ahead, in 2021, we see hopes of a recovery in the aviation industry. The Commercial Aerospace team comprises highly experienced and disciplined people who have been doing all the right things even before the pandemic struck. For instance, the team turned the crisis into opportunities with the offering of value- added ideas such as cabin disinfection and safety solutions to support airline customers during the pandemic. I am confident that the team will be able to continue in their excellent work. What I will do is to cheer them on and remove unproductive processes from their work. I will also help them increase their bandwidth in pursuing growth initiatives by leveraging my industry relationships and experience. 31 ANNUAL REPORT 2 0 20 /