“WE VENTURED INTO INDONESIA WITH A MISSION TO SUPPORT THE DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION OF INDONESIA”

“I believe some relaxation is coming, but the demand is still high. Manufacturers are not able to deliver the equipment on time because logistics are still an issue,” says Patankar.

“Instead of sticking to one supplier for one improvement, we diversified geographically. Different leading brands came together. We worked with different suppliers and reduced our reliance on a single one, but also in terms of geographical resources, equipment from Europe, as well as resources from the US and equipment from Australia, China, South Korea.”

Before BDx Indonesia could diversify its operations, the initial challenge was understanding the different specifications of various suppliers to determine the services that it could provide with each. Unlike the standard procurement method whereby the solution must be correct, the company adapted its approach to recognise that various models could achieve the same outcomes with a more flexible outlook.

“We became transparent to our suppliers. We created a complete plan for five years: our capacity, increment plans, our expansion plans,” Patankar says.

“In every meeting, online or offline, we explained those plans to our suppliers. We became transparent. We said, this is all coming in and we need your support, which particular project do you want to pick up? Which project can you support? Which equipment can you support?

“As we were transparent, both sides, customers as well as suppliers, started believing in us.”

Rather than accepting the traditional approach to equipment delivery and leaving suppliers responsible for delivery on time, BDx Indonesia asks them what they can offer and adapts its approach accordingly.

“As the customer now considers us as their family, suppliers are our family. It’s not only about asking them, ‘Hey, can you deliver this equipment on time or not?’,” says Patankar.

“We need to look into their capacity, their capabilities, their financial stability, and a lot of similar and important things. So we need to work with them.”

This approach to suppliers and customers is what allows BDx Indonesia to focus more on building sustainable partnerships with companies to create understanding and cooperation while developing the edge potential of data centres in the country. By meeting the needs of stakeholders, BDx Indonesia is able to follow a more informed trajectory with support from some major businesses – one of them being the equipment and cloud provider Huawei.

“Huawei is one of our trusted supply chain partners. A good thing about them is their approach to us. Much like our own supply chain, other supply chain partners know we

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are very transparent with our customers and so they do too,” Patankar explains.

“A supply chain partner of ours must be transparent. Huawei is very upfront, telling us what they can and can’t do on time. They’re aware of all the ongoing and upcoming projects, but what they do for us is plan inventory on their side so that they can help us to deliver the project on time in a costeffective manner.”

As the footprint of BDx grows, particularly in Indonesia, the company will continue to leverage partnerships to provide a much more agile approach to procuring the necessary components for its data centres, but also encourage a transparency method of customer service. In such a dynamic industry, BDx Indonesia can look ahead as early as six months and as far as 18 to assess the evolution of its operations –with increasing capacity being the primary, overarching endeavour.

Beyond the facilities though, Patankar says that the organisation itself must develop to navigate its growth with an emphasis on the talent it already has within the team.

“It’s not only about just creating the facility or enabling business, it’s also about developing the team, creating the talent. People who work with us bring value to the company,” says Patankar.

“People who work with the company create the company, build the company. So we understood that talent is important in the data centre industry. There is a shortage and we need to address this. So, we already began on-ground training by sending our engineers from here to Singapore to train them in our live data centres with various standards of operation.”