Written by Cynthia Subroto, MBA YP 58
Sofrecom is a consulting and engineering company specializing in telecommunications. It is a subsidiary of the Orange Group that has done its business in more than 100 countries. Sales Account Director of Sofrecom Indonesia, Mr. Achsan Bashori Al Alam, came to MBA ITB as a guest lecture in Corporate Entrepreneurship class on Tuesday, 22nd October 2019 and shared about corporate strategy of partnership with foreign principal and local development.
“Partnership with foreign principal and local development is very important according to my experience,” said Mr. Achsan. He also shared the important things needed at the beginning of career life in the first section. It would be very useful for students who have not started or just started their career life. He said that career is not sprint, but marathon. It took nine years of journey to get him in his position now. He learned characters that has to be built in the first five years of career were design thinking and dealing for the hard skill, and fighter and open minded as the soft skill. He also reminded that the students should always be a part of big families in any condition, as he quoted from Dominique Toretto, “Money will come and go, we know that. But the most important things in this life will always be the people in this room.”
In the next section, Mr. Achsan explained about why partnership is important for business. The reason that partnership is important because it can attract new customer and market coverage, strengthen brand position, broaden product and service offering, and improve solution for customer. He added that our company could help solving our partner’s problem while also help our company’s name to become more famous, especially if the partners are from foreign country. “It is proven that foreign products are powerful and robust”, said Mr. Achsan.
The third section was about how to build partnership. Things to do are understanding requirement of current customer, forecast technology and business opportunity, partnership sourcing, client and partner engagement, and collaborate local or inhouse resource with partner. He emphasized that build trust from client and partner is a must. We should bring our clients to meet our partner directly if needed, even if it has to go abroad. It would be a worth investment.
Collaborate partnership was explained in the last section. Strategic points for collaboration are local support, enhance competitiveness, knowledge acquisition, and leverage product solution. Mr. Achsan said that local support is very important and mixed local and foreign partners will be competitiveness for company.
The topic that Mr. Achsan brought in the class was considered new and rarely discussed. All the students got new insight from this topic that would give benefit for their careers.