 | UNIDO Pharos workshop in Jakarta, Indonesia The UNIDO Pharos Training Workshop in Indonesia was initiated and implemented by State Ministry of Research and Technology of Indonesia - MoRT (or RISTEK in Indonesian abbreviation), UNIDO (Vienna) and ICS (Trieste, Italy). The workshop organization was implemented by Management of Innovation & Technology Center (MIT, operating under MoRT/RISTEK) headed by Mr. Ardito M Kodijat, General Manager. The event took place in Millennium Hotel Sirih, Jakarta on 31 July - 04 August 2006. 
Photo: Workshop participants. Sitting in the first row (left to right): A.Kodijat, S.Golovanov, B.Setiadi, R.Tavares, N.Alie,, M.Pirondini .The objectives of the workshop were as follows: 1. Enhancing knowledge and available tools for effective management of technology development and transfer by introducing UNIDO Pharos software suite for monitoring, management, measurement and benchmarking of enterprise business performance facilitating competitiveness, productivity, capacity for trade, exports, investments and innovation management. 2. Consulting of national consultants and prospective focal point partners in developing support for the enterprises in the regions on UNIDO Pharos suite application development including data preparation, entry, enterprise measurement and monitoring, identification of problematic areas, setting up continuous improvement practices, benchmarking of the enterprise improvements, certification. Among 22 participants of the Workshop there were entrepreneurs and executives from enterprises and trainer/consultants from major industrial areas of Indonesia including 9 trainers/consultants and 11 entrepreneurs from 13 major cities located on 6 islands (Pasuruan and Surabaya - East Java, Subang and Bogor - West Java, Yogyakarta - Central Java, Makassar- South Sulawesi, Riau - Pekanbaru and Jakarta. Most of the trainers/consultants were professionals involved in implementation of training in various institutions or business consultants and members of the network of experts collaborating with the MIT Centre in providing assistance to SMEs in Indonesia. The group of entrepreneurs consisted of managers and enterprise owners. The the workshop was opened by Mr. Bambang Setiadi, Deputy Minister for Research, Science and Technology Programs, MoRT, 
and continued with remarks by Mr. Nahruddin Alie, UNIDO Office in Jakarta and Mr. Raymond Tavares, ICS-UNIDO.  
The speakers reviewed the project history, on-going UNIDO activities in Indonesia, collaboration between national and international agencies as well as current status of developments. They underlined the importance of enhancing entrepreneur knowledge and providing the Information Technology tools for effective management of technology development and transfer in industrial environment.  The training session began with overview of approaches to enterprise performance management, measurement and benchmarking, its importance for sustainable and productive business development in competitive business environment. The analysis of actual situation in using the tools in SME environment was provided by Mr. S.Golovanov, the workshop coach while presenting the experiences of UNIDO upgrading programmes in various countries. He mentioned that the majority of entrepreneurs run their enterprises ?AS IT IS?, without using any IT tools for measuring and benchmarking of their businesses. Consequently various inefficiencies, losses and problems are unknown until they grow up. The practices of budgeting, setting up business targets, systematically comparing the results against targets, simulating major decisions, analyzing consequences of decisions made previously are very rare. Consequently it leads to ineffective use of available resources, high mortality of SMEs especially after successful start-ups (~ 60% of all cases), decreased competitiveness, lack of capacity to manage change, including innovations and investments, cope with globalization and overall undeveloped potential of economic growth in national scale.
 Photo: Workshop session UNIDO Pharos software suite provides entrepreneurs with unique opportunity for introduction of simple IT tools into business monitoring and provides for developing of best continuous improvement practices as well as new business culture. It does not impose any requirements to entrepreneur knowledge, has minimum costs including training of staff and does not change business processes unless required by improvements. The workshop programme included 4 days of training covering Pharos, Produce Plus, FIT software applications and case studies developed in UNIDO upgrading programmes over the previous years. One working day was allocated to presentation of UNIDO COMFAR software by UNIDO Jakarta and review of its best practices. In the discussions and the concluding session of workshop the participants positively evaluated the implementation of MoRT-UNIDO-ICS project underlining the importance of such solution for entrepreneurs and business consultants in Indonesia. 
Photo: Workshop session They mentioned that the need for facilitating development of knowledge capital, effective management of technology developments and transfer, innovation management and sustainable economic development of SME industries in Indonesia became vital for developing competitive position of the national industries in the world economy and in Asia in particular.  Photo: Workshop session Several entrepreneurs and consultants noted that UNIDO Pharos suite and its methodology for improving enterprises performance are unique and affordable for entrepreneurs in Indonesia. There are no similar simple and inexpensive IT tools on the market effectively supporting SME entrepreneurs in achieving of these goals. Enterprises do not have sufficient internal resources to install, learn, run similar IT applications available on he market and develop best practices. Well known methods and IT solutions such as Balanced Score Card, Operational Dashboards, Business Intelligence, etc. are aimed toward large corporate or high end of middle size enterprises. The costs of software licensing and implementation, including business restructuring, training of employees and technical support are beyond of capacity of the majority of SMEs.  Photo: Mr. Herman Budiharsono, Consultant, Process & Engineering, evaluates the workshop results As a matter of fact the introduction of the business support systems becomes feasible only after an enterprise reaches the size of above 150-200 employees in its development. It however may not be able to reach this stage due to various failures, mistakes and mismanagement practices while in growth due to lack of entrepreneur understanding about actual enterprise status. 
As it was mentioned by Mr. Heru Datta Wardana, the workshop participant and manager of company "Cosmetic and Herbal Products", Jakarta in the discussion, Pharos suite can be easily adapted to Indonesian business environment and effectively be used to facilitate learning, capacity building and business improvement by entrepreneurs. The software provides for simple and low cost data collection tool in enterprise certification and benchmarking programmes as well. The workshop participants indicated that applying of UNIDO IT business performance tools to innovation management, capacity building and certification programmes for small and medium size enterprises (SME) in industrial regions of Indonesia were among major topics of their interest while deciding to take part in the workshop. The training aimed at developing national consultants and entrepreneurs capacity for software installation, instructing enterprise personnel in data collection procedures, definitions of business targets, running automated export/import setup and operation, benchmarking of business results and its interpretation, and carrying out enterprise diagnostics and preparing benchmarking reports, defining product costing, labor and equipment efficiencies in production. The workshop programme can be reviewed here >>>. UNIDO Pharos workshop news at RISTEK site (in Indonesian) >>> Download the workshop presentations: 1. "Empowering entrepreneurs with knowledge capital and best continuous improvement practices for profitability, competitiveness, capacity for trade, exports and investments, sustainable growth by introducing basic IT tools for business performance measurement, management and benchmarking" 2. Enterprise benchmarking with Pharos Feedback |
