The cultural industry in Singapore has blossomed of late and now high art and the wonderful world of cultural exhibitions have invaded this island nation to an extent where the scene itself has piqued interest within the community. The National Arts Council and the Heritage Board, working together with MICA (Ministry of Information, Culture and the Arts) have worked together for years to build Singapore into a Renaissance City – hoping to emulate the explosion of culture and art in Italy in the 14th Century – and hopefully spawning their own Michelangelo or Leonardo Da Vinci.
The Singapore museum and the heritage museum are just some of the examples of how this nation has leveraged on its own culture and rich history to put together exhibitions and attractions that cannot be missed. Singapore’s founding, its prime leaders and its birth from a footnote in history to Sovereign nation are chronicled in a rich world of sound, art and words in the Singapore National Museum and the heritage gallery as well. Be sucked into the 1900’s again as chronicled in acute detailed is history of Singapore – with journals of our early colonial founders etched out in aching beauty and sound. Also, recently in the national museum was some of the notes of William Farquhar and his chronicle of some of the species of animals that used to reside in the Singapore jungles and some of the names the locals or ‘Orang Asli’ used to give to them.
The Asian Civilisation Museum is also a prime example of a cultural Singapore attraction that you must visit as soon as possible. The rich tapestry of the Asian civilisations are realised in life like and breathtaking models and statues transported from dig sites all over Inner Mongolia, China and all over South East Asia. Be amazed as they tell the histories and lifestyle of Old Asia in a way no – one can, through pictures and objects that inspire the greatest story teller of all – your imagination. This museum also deals with propaganda and cultural material and how politics of old and of new has changed the face of culture in countries like Burma, Indonesia and China.
There is no end to the sort of cultural experiences you can enjoy in Singapore. The National Heritage Board has a smorgasbord of facilities and organisations to whet the cultural appetite. They have converted the old Ford Factory in Singapore to a memorial – museum like emporium of the 1960’s. The Peranakan Museum and the Singapore Philatelic Museum are just some of the examples of rich locations where you can view great cultural pieces and demonstrations for just a nominal fee.
Singapore is culture. It is founded on culture, built by tradition and lovingly shaped by hundreds of years of history – a maelstrom of inculturality that has given this country an identity that is rich, varied and beautiful. Singapore has decided to share this with anyone who wants to look, as well as bringing the rest of greater Asia into a single location – to inspire a living heritage and dynamic cultural attractions.
Asia is a magical and mystical continent that has cast a spell on people all over. There is so much to explore in this beautiful continent that a small space to talk about would not be sufficient enough. The beautiful land, architectural heritage, different cultures, various traditions, manmade and natural structures and many more things are just irresistible which make Asia or what it is famous today. Asia has rich culture and traditional values and one just can not remain untouched from these.
Some of the wonders of Asiaare Taj Mahal, Great Wall of China, Wadi Rum desert, Kujharao temples, Sigiriya, Ko phi phi, Sinharaja forest, K2 mountain, mount Everest, Rara lake, chocolate hills, Maldives Archipelago, Mount Fiji mountain, Ganges river, Chitwan national park, Flaming cliffs, Dead sea, Baikal, beautiful Konark temple, Ajanta and Ellora, patronas twin towers of Malaysia, Shanghai Financial Center, Golden Temple, Red fort, Hay long Bay, Cox’s Bazaar beach, Sunderban forests, Osaka Castle, Dunhuang Caves Basilica of Bom Jesus, Cholas temple and many more.
Few of these manmade Asian edifices have been declared as wonders of the world. Taj Mahal of India and the Great Wall of China are among the new wonders of the world and are great examples of beautiful Asian architecture. These have brought not only fame but have been acclaimed by people world over.
These monuments are not just classical examples of rich heritage but also speak about the history behind them. The natural beautiful sites are the best wonders gifted by nature and god to mankind which attract people from all over the world and influence them to a great extent. Thus Asia attracts many people and has become a famous tourist destination.
Wonders of Asia are not just restricted to the manmade and natural edifices but also include the other rich cultural and traditional aspects that bestow people with great magnificence that can make them spell bound.
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Asian refers to all the people who are residing in Asia.
There are many countries that form a part of the continent of Asia like the Islamic nations and the Southeastern countries of Nepal, India and Bangladesh. Asia has the largest land mass in the whole world and is a home to a majority of human population that is residing in the world. Most of the densely populated countries of the world are situated in Asia. There are a large number of countries that constitute this continent and as a result it is home to a wide variety of cultures and traditions. People of Asia are very strongly attached to their homelands and find it very painful to separate from their native countries.
Asian people are progenies of an umpteen number of ethnic races. It contains countries like India, Pakistan, Myanmar, China, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the developed countries of Japan and Russia. This continent is abounding with a variety of climates, lands and amazing landscapes. From Himalayas to the arid lands of Mongolia and Afghanistan, the continent of Asia is bestowed with amazing landscapes. Asia has a huge area of land and the western part of Asia comprises Muslim countries like UAE, Qatar, Iraq, Iran and Dubai and contains features of Arab and Iranian cultures. Asia has people following all the religions from Hinduism, Islam and Christianity. The continent of Asia is blessed with fertile lands in China and India and excels in agricultural production of food grains and rice.
Asian people are known all over the world for their strong cultural values and intelligent minds. This continent has given birth to many famous scientists, celebrities and politicians. Although this continent does not boast of many developed countries, many developing countries within this continent are on the threshold of becoming developed. Asia as a continent was initially under the colonial rule for a very long time except for the countries of Japan or Russia. Many nations like India, China, Pakistan and Afghanistan have suffered the brunt of oppressive colonial rule by Europeans and Americans for a very long period of time.
Times have changed now and the countries of this continent are embarking on the era of economic development like never before. Southeastern countries like India, Sri Lanka and China are experiencing amazingly high rates of per capita GDP growth. These countries have also made an effort to preserve communal harmony and unity by following a policy of inter-regional cooperation and forming associations for the above purpose like SAARC.They have also forged important trade alliances with each other to mutual boost economic growth.
Asia is well known for celebrations and festivals. It is a land where festivals of different cultures and religions are being celebrated. Among the major Hindu festivals are Diwali, Holi, Baisakhi, and Eid ul-Fitr, Dusshera, Onam and Christmas and are celebrated with great fervor all over India.
Kashmir, situated on the old Silk Road in spite of being nestled by high mountains, has been exposed to cultural influences from various lands. The famous Silk Route which began to be used from about the first century BC not only carried traders, raiders and armies but also immigrants, philosophers, thinkers and men of artistic talent acquainted with religious philosophies. This route also carried cultural influences and ideas across the borders. Kashmir that occupied an important place on the cultural map of Central Asia is up to this day famous for its richness of culture and beauty of its arts and crafts. She maintained close relations with different parts of Central Asia since ancient times. The Buddhist missionaries from Kashmir were the first to spread the Buddhist philosophy in Central Asian territories across the Hindukush in Afghanistan, in China and Tibet as a result of which a new religion took roots in these lands. Many Buddhist scholars from these lands traveled across the deserts and mountains for their schooling in Kashmir. As a result the ancient arts of Kashmir, be it sculpture or architecture, show many similarities in designs, in iconography or in skills of production with the centers of excellence that existed outside Kashmir at that time. The exchange of ideas placed Kashmir at a very high pedestal in such productions and was known all over the region for such artistic creations. These connections were further advanced by political relations, matrimonial alliances and employment of Central Asians in Kashmir establishments.
With the foundation of Sultanate in AD 1339, Kashmir became the magnetic attraction for the Muslim missionaries, sufis, saints and ulemas (Muslim theologians) from Central Asia, who propagated the message of Islam in the region. Most of the time they comprised men from all walks of life to introduce Central Asian skills and technologies as well. Tradition says that Syed Ali Hamdani, the learned saint from Central Asia visited Kashmir in the late 14th century for the purpose of propagation of Islam in Kashmir and brought with him over seven hundred disciples, some of whom were said to be skilled craftsmen. These missionaries also brought with them their own life style, language, dress pattern, food habits etc that subsequently got disseminated among the local people. The influx was such that it was feared then that all these new cultural waves shall engulf the inhabitants, which subsequently did happen.
The Sultan was himself a symbol of these introductions and put on such dresses that were regarded excellent, beautiful and colourful. These were in silk as new technology was introduced when the use of weavers brush and loom for the weaving of silk in Kashmir was attempted. It can be deduced with a fair degree of accuracy from Pundit Srivara’s account that Zain-ul-Abdin introduced multi-heddle looms from Central Asia or Khurasan in which circular plant designs were weaved besides animated figures. In the reign of Sultan Zain-ul-Abdin art, culture, fine arts and literature flourished in Kashmir, particularly that of Bukhara and Samarkand. Besides the multi heddle looms for silk weaving, wood carving, enameling, stone cutting, stone polishing, bottle making, window cutting (tabadan-turash), calligraphy and book binding, carpet making and a number of other arts and crafts, which sooth the eye with their intricacies flowered under the impact of Central Asia. The local people started working on the original models from Iran and Central Asia, and in many cases they experimented with new models that led to the evolution of new forms and movements. The fresh introductions must have taken roots deep even after the death of the Zain-ul-Abdin, as seventy years latter Mirza Haidar Dughlat records the glory of these crafts in these words: “in Kashmir one meets with all those arts and crafts which are in most cities uncommon. In the whole of Mavara-u-Nahr except Samarkand and Bukhara these are now here to be met with while in Kashmir they are abundant. This is all due to Sultan Zain-ul-Abdin”. A further boost to the crafts of Kashmir may have taken place when the Central Asian noble Mirza Haidar invaded Kashmir and his subsequent ten year political domination of the country contributed significantly to the technological and cultural transfusion from Central Asia to Kashmir. His personal and perspective patronage gave a renewed boost to these industries and commerce, the benefits of which were later enjoyed by the Chak rulers who followed him. The valley henceforth experienced its second cultural resurgence whose impact lasted long enough for Mirza’s illustrious nephew (Jehangir) to appreciate as he introduced various types of musical instruments, new types of windows and doors, and also made innovations in dress and diet. As a result of such close relations, the arts and crafts of Kashmir show exuberant influences of Central Asia.
With my current role of managing global virtual project teams, I have been asked repeatedly by my peers on what are the key success factors of implementing SAP for plant start-up in Asia, especially since the users have no previous SAP experience and business process knowledge ,and English is not their first language.
As you can see, global project teams have several unique characters and challenges, such as multi-functional, constantly evolving to meet business and resource constraints, matrix structured, culturally diverse and geographically distributed. These challenges resulted in that corporate culture is not very conductive for effective communication and cross-team learning. Many learning opportunities are missed and corporate have been paying high price for repeating similar mistakes. Thus, capturing and sharing lessons learned as must-to-have project management processes will reduce global project costs and increase customers and users’ satisfaction.
If you are responsible for global SAP rollout, here are some lessons learned that can benefit your team and your company.
Lessons Learned – Local Leadership Buy-in event More often, global project team encounters issues like roles and responsibilities of extended team* are not well defined, local support team resources are not committed after project started, there is no go-to person on site to coordinate issues between site, business team and project team, etc. In order to get full support from the local leadership team, a project buy-in event needs to carry out by change management team 3-6 months prior to the project kick-off to help local leaders to understand that SAP implementation project is not only an IT implementation, but a business project as well; to help local leaders to understand the importance of aligning business to SAP; to communicate with local leaders clearly about organizational structure, business processes and business units that will be impacted by implementation, resource requirements, etc.
Lessons Learned – Decoding Email Messages As many companies are moving their business to Asia, communicating effectively in a cross-cultural work environment can ensure companies’ international business success. Due to the language barriers and different vocabulary systems, core team and local users are having difficulty understanding and decoding email messages. As a result, misunderstanding often arises and issues do not get resolved on time, which affects activities schedule and eventually, affects the rollout schedule.
The recommendation is to conduct a Cross-Cultural Communication session during the Kick-off period to the local users and project team to recognize specific cultural differences, to aware of communication differences and to overcome or minimize the cultural communication barriers to high quality communication.
Lessons Learned – Local Site Coordinator Global SAP ERP project team normally is referred to as “virtual team”. Team members are working on remote and scattered all over the world. For example, my team has about sixty members and they are located in Germany, Budapest, Mexico, US, Canada, Singapore, China. A lot of times, core team members do not know who to go to address local business-related activities and issues; users do not know who to go to bring up project and business-related issues; and local site management does not get the latest project status therefore unable to provide just-in-time support.
The recommendation is to nominate an experienced site coordinator onsite to act as a local go-to person for all SAP-related issues. The role is responsible for communicating to all appropriate parties on overall project status, issues, successes, and barriers to keep the members engaged in the project.
Lessons Learned – ERP concept and Global Business Process For most international companies, global SAP implementation is to provide an ERP solution in support of constructing new production start-up in Asia. Most of users are new hires and they do not understand the ERP concept or the Global Template; they do not understand their roles and the associated business processes.
Recommendation is to conduct a Global Template Familiarization session to introduce the Global End-to-End Processes to the users. Afterwards, change management team should work with the local business to determine which processes are applicable to the site, and which ones need localization due to legal and language requirements. A process mapping exercise is highly recommended as well, where the to-be processes (Visio diagram with swim-lanes) are finalized and presented to the local management team. Upon their agreement, SAP roles are able locked, training courses for different SAP roles can be assigned.
Lessons Learned – To-be Process Like I mentioned above, users are new and they do not have much of SAP and business process knowledge. It is unrealistic to expect users to grasp the to-be process fully.
Recommendation is to conduct a User Acceptance Test/Process Testing prior to go-live after end user Basic SAP and business process training. By now, the design has been tested by the Core Team, actual data has been loaded to the test environment, and Super Users have been trained in SAP and business concepts. The Super Users run through the integration test script. This milestone ensures the design works, the data load is accurate and complete, and the super users are trained properly. This key success step should be included in the project plan in order to give core team, business team and extended team good visibility.
Lessons Learned – Master Data & Data Validation Another issue global SAP implementation team faces is that requesting for data validation took much longer than expected. Three steps that involved in master data. There are data collecting, data loading and data validation. Because not all colleagues from business have been told the data collection process, “how” to validate and the importance of validation, master data always came last minute and past the deadline.
The recommendation is that change management team to conduct workshops locally to explain the data collection and data validation process to business users; to help users understand the meaning of the fields to be validated; and to communicate roles and responsibilities surrounding master data collection and validation by specify who will do what by when. Further, requests for validation should be to a single individual, not a group. Project manager should segregate data load and data validation activities in work plan and ties back to articulating due dates for specific activities and responsibilities distribution list.
Lessons Learned – End User Training According to normal SAP implementation methodology, change management team plans the training activities one month before system go-live. The training focuses on to-be processes.
Due to the cultural differences, people in Asia intent to nod a lot when instructor talking. It does mean they understand what instructor talking about, it only means that “I hear you”. They may not tell instructors if they really understand the process/SAP transactions or not. Core team members, for example, weren’t aware that some users didn’t take the basic SAP training until they started the delta training. This resulted in that user’s SAP and business process knowledge level may not attain the level expected and some users are unable to perform transactions in SAP, e.g. create STO to move raw materials from the US to Asia, near go-live.
The recommendation is to set up process to on board new staff. The process includes obtain the SAP ID, go through the SAP navigation training, the SAP functional module training, obtain the knowledge from Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), and go through the after-training test. The process should ensure the new users fully understand the process and can create the transactions in SAP independently. The standard training goes first, and in the support period, have a 2-3 week refresher training. People are more familiar with the process and know how SAP supports the process. They then start asking questions and we know their learning situation.
Sounded communication between core team and local extended team is very important factor for global SAP rollout. Including all team members in the email loop and plan the regular team update meetings can keep all parties on the same page on each project stage.
In summary, many leading companies use SAP ERP system as an essential infrastructure to provide integrated and standardized real time data to support their global operations. As they move their productions to Asia, they are facing very complicated issues and unique challenges due to national cultural differences and local requirements. Researches of the impact of different cultures on SAP ERP systems implementation in Asian region have not been taken widely yet. Any mistakes of implementation can cost company millions and millions of dollars. Therefore, these lessons we learned from real-time SAP rollouts will provide some guidance on global SAP ERP implementation in Asia.
