Photo: Aspex Kumbong innovates through new product development, cost efficiency, and employee awareness programs to sustain itself in the 4.0 era
CILEUNGSI – Industry 4.0 is a phenomenon that has transformed industrial paradigms. With broader connectivity, it provides benefits like real-time production monitoring and optimization, lower production costs, and higher efficiency.
Yet, market-changing breakthroughs have also come out of the massive physical and digital technological developments. Making a knee-jerk reaction to these shifts and changes will bring one’s business to an end, and affect multiple parties.
This 4.0. era once sent Korindo Group’s paper and tissue company, PT Aspex Kumbong, into its own ups and downs. In 2015, the company was rocked by a drop in newsprint demand.
The rise of internet and smartphones has given birth to digital media, which completely altered the mass media industry. Almost every print media company has now spread out to online platforms, offering quick, practical reporting and news tickers that slowly but surely threaten the dominance of physical publication. McKinsey’s 2019 data reported a decline in graphic paper sales (including newsprint, printing, and writing paper) from 2010 to 2018.
“Today, innovation is a highly needed thing. It’s a key element of competition, bringing competitive advantage to companies through new ideas, new processes, new products, or improvements to current business conditions.
Innovation takes center stage in the fight against highly-competitive markets, like the one Aspex faced when digitalization reduced newsprint demand. To pull through, we had to do something new, whether that’s creating new products or improving efficiency,” said general manager Jung Chan Ho.
To survive the storm, Aspex — which focused on newspaper printing — turned to various efforts, including developing new products, achieving cost efficiency, and running an employee awareness program.
This program took the form of a motivational training aimed at reinforcing a sense of belonging among employees.
“This training is designed to boost awareness [of our situation]. Through it, we talked about the state of newsprint in the digital era and how we should approach it. Of course, in order to keep ourselves afloat, we need everyone in the company to be aware and innovate,” said Jung.
In Aspex, cost efficiency is achieved through the 6S system (stands for Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardize, Sustain, and Safety), with which the company tries to organize and improve work tools. With discipline, Aspex has curbed costs by billions of rupiahs.
Having the right strategy is critical to addressing the challenges of the 4.0 age. Companies must thoroughly map their threats and opportunities, and mobilize resources by taking advantage of potential markets.
For instance, the rise of e-commerce can create demand for packaging paper and increase the use of cardboard boxes. This would lead to paper market growth, although not as fast as it was fifteen to twenty years ago. There’s a chance given growth prospects for tissues and packaging paper in Asian countries (besides China and Japan) remain above 2%.
Taking on these possibilities, the Aspex team made many efforts to diversify their offerings. Without changing equipment or investing in new ones, the company tried to use its newsprint machine to produce medium kraft paper, which generated positive response from the market.
Aspex’s production division continued to engage in product innovation and continuous improvement until 2023, when it modified the paper machine to expand production capacity and add products similar to kraft paper with high grammage.
Innovation should occur collectively to reap great results, Jung said. He appreciated Aspex’s steps to drive employee innovation, which include the Innovation Festival.
“I hope Inofest will inspire everyone to break new ground in their work units, and encourage them to contribute creative ideas for the advancement of the company. Innovations can be anything, like environmental improvements, safety improvements, and such.” (Nunung/AK/PR)
