Homes that match customers’ needs

“I work together with Stanford University and am learning how to do business in the new-economy environment where digital and big data have the influence to drive business at this time,” he said.
The company made big changes in its organisation in 2016 to 2017, after a slide in its total revenues. 
“My question at that time was how to drive sustainable business growth, how to organise the business. I read a book and got coaching from Dr Terry Warner, who founded Arbinger Institute in the USA,” said Anuphong.
“This changed my mindset to doing business from the inside to outside. This is the way we changed our business organisation and had success driving business growth from 2017 till 2018, with our total revenue recorded at over Bt20 billion in 2017.”
In 2014, AP (Thailand) Plc posted record-high total revenues of Bt23.2 billion, with Bt2.6 billion in net profit, before dropping in 2015 and 2016 to Bt22.39 billion and Bt20.81 billion respectively.
This forced the company management to seek a way to maintain business growth, including reorganising to find efficiencies along with driving sustainable growth over the long term. 
Anuphong thought a lot at the time about what he should do until he took coaching from Dr Terry Warner, who is now 84 years old. Warner’s approach is to think from the inside to the outside, turning on its head the traditional business approach in which the CEO is expected to solve a firm’s problems. Warner’s approach is to give senior staff a lot of independence in exchange for taking responsibility for the business under their cover.
The company also changed the way it set up key performance indicators or KPIs, shifting from a yearly growth target to three-year targets for low-rise residences and single detached houses and townhouses, and four-year targets for condominiums.
This takes some of the short-term pressure off staff, while also providing benefits for allowing them to get onboard with the company’s approach for long-term success.
Normally, single detached houses and townhouses take about three years from the project launch until they are sold out. Condominiums take about four years.
But the new management approach of independence with responsibility has stimulated more creativity from staff, including new products designed under the theme of design thinking in collaboration with Stanford University.
Anuphong said that Design Thinking turns to the customers – the inside – to help design the company’s residential products by surveying and learning what customers need when they are making a residential purchase decision. There are many categories of customers – ageing, working, younger, kids, for example – and the company needs to learn what they want in a home.
The designs have to match their lifestyles, as it has to provide a quality of living for its customers. 
 “After we changed our mindset and the way we do business, I now focus only on the policies, and our key head staff have to operate their own departments and functions such as products design, deciding which land to buy, etc,” he said. “This creates more residential design under the AP umbrella. This is also different from when we make a decision on our own.”
After it changed the way it did business in 2016, the company has gone on to success with total revenues of Bt22.85 billion in 2017 and achieved a record high net profit of Bt3.1 billion for the year. And the company has gone on to record total revenue of Bt12.8 billion, and a net profit of Bt1.9 billion in the first half of this year, up 72.72 per cent from the same period last year.
“Financial results for 2017 is one of the fingers pointing to our move being the right one, along with the staff being happy doing their work and also being empowered and have more energy to drive business growth. These show we have found the best way to drive our business under the concept, “quality of living”, and that’s what we do,” Anuphong said.
Integration of units Under the concept of “quality of living provider”, the company has integrated all its business units for them to function and drive in the right direction to improve growth.
“We have merged all our business units, including the construction firm SQE Construction Co Ltd, property management firm Smart Service Management, and brokerage Bangkok CitiSmart. Together, they will be our tool to drive business growth under the policy of being a ‘quality of living’ provider,” Anuphong said.
For the construction process, the company is also collaborating with and learning from its Japanese partner, Mitsubishi Estate Group, to develop residential projects under the building information modelling or BIM system. 
“We started to use artificial intelligence-backed BIM for single-detached houses and townhouses last year, and that success led us to create new designs to match our customers’ demands and the differentiated demands that they have,” he said.
“We then started to apply this system to help build our condominium projects this year.”
Anuphong said that BIM covered all of the company’s business processes, including design and visualisation, scheduling, cost control, energy analysis, and facility management. This enables the company to design smart residential properties at a time when the industry faces high competition in the market.
By following this system, the company can make designs for a range of residential property types, from the mass market to unique designs that address all the different demands of customers. Many homebuyers also required additional space to accommodate up to three generations under one roof, he added.
Meanwhile, the company also uses digital and artificial intelligence or AI to support its business design and gather information on homebuyers’ needs.
“We use big data and digital application to serve our customer demand,” said Anuphong. “We’ve learned how to use digital at a time when digital is disrupting all industries, but we have to change the disruption so we can utilise it to serve our purposes. We learn what our customers want and learn to select to use innovations to serve our customers. New technology is born every day; we have to select which ones match our business, rather than catching up with all.” 
Under his business model, says Anuphong, AP (Thailand) Plc must be a property firm that provides quality of living for their customers during this period of changes.
“We cannot say what will happen in the country’s property sector in five or 10 years from now, but we can say that we are one of the quality property firms that provide quality of living for our customers.”