Subra

Entrepreneur-Engineer At Heart

Subramaniam Apala Naidu or Subra, the COO and co-founder of STRAVIK Business Consulting, comes with more than 25 years of extensive engineering experience in the semiconductor manufacturing sector.

His technical capabilities were honed from decades of working in semiconductor companies such as Advanced Semiconductor Engineering and Advantest.

He is also an entrepreneur at heart – he started up the first cash-less self-service laundry outlet in the Northern region for which the Malaysian Indian Network of Entrepreneurs Association awarded him a “Small Medium Business Award” in 2018.

His remote-operated laundry system uses a smart system to free up the laundry outlet owner from dealing with typical laundrette problems. Approximately 80% of the manual tasks are taken over by systems so that the laundry outlet owner can focus his effort on customer support.

With a system that can be accessed from a smartphone, the laundry outlet owner can monitor and track daily sales and operations remotely. He gets to focus on data such as real-time outlet patronage, predictive maintenance and inventory orders for detergent.

Subra has also worked on food business innovation. In 2017, he created a new method for grilling meat for a local food and beverage business using his engineering quality control methodology and LEAN concepts to establish clear process flows.

As a result of his business optimisation strategies, the business increased its cooking capacity by 20% while lowering 30% of overall costs. He also re-engineered the kitchen exhaust system which improved the efficiency by 35% and re-architected the outlet to yield more than 300% profit within a three-year period. Subra’s solution helped the business owner reduce dependency on his kitchen staff without compromising on food quality and taste.

Simplifying Business Processes

When he was the engineering operation manager for Advanced Semiconductor Engineering (ASE), he successfully managed an entire team of production, test module and product engineering teams comprising section heads, engineers and technicians. 

He led them to integrate, develop and manage complex yet cost-saving engineering solutions to meet organisational objectives. This included simplifying processes, re-imagining workflow processes, adopting methods to reduce costs such as Usage Controls, Spare Barter Trade System & 3R (Return-Recheck-Reuse).

He also led the engineering section to meet customers’ requirements and his team was awarded the ISO 9001, ISO/TS 16949 and QC 80K which opened up newer business opportunities for ASE.

As a team-focused leader, Subra developed a weekly engineering forum for area leads to share indicators and create engineering improvements. His pursuit of optimisation didn’t stop there – he even revamped the company’s training programmes by making them more measurable and transparent.

Subra is a graduate of Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom and received his Bachelor of Electrical & Electronic Engineering with Honors, in 1998.