An expanding Coventry business has won three major new contracts in Singapore after setting up a new base in Asia.

Knowledge Management and Transfer (KM&T), based at the Coventry University Technocentre in Puma Way, specialises in "Lean Thinking" which assesses companies and suggests improvements to create more efficient and streamlined business processes.

Scott Middleton was appointed Managing Director for Asia and has been instrumental in securing contracts within the Ministry of Finance, the National Healthcare Group Polyclinics and DB Schenker who are the logistics partner of Volkswagen.

Scott, who has worked in Singapore for nearly five years, said the standard of the contracts vindicated KM&T's decision to open an office in the country in November.

"We have won a tender with the Ministry of Finance to look at a pilot programme within the Singapore Prison Service, the Singapore Customs and Vital.Org who are the finance ministries back office function" he said.

"Prisoners on remand have special privileges to ask their friends and family to buy them food, refreshments, books and magazines. 

"Instead of having to visit since remand prisoners are often moved to different prisons, a video conference is set up with the families but there have been long delays between the requests being made and the privileges arriving so KM&T is looking at the whole system to speed up the process.

"We are working with Singapore Customs via the Ministry of Finance to look at the paperwork process of monitoring containers that arrive and depart since Singapore is the world's busiest container port. 

"We have also won a contract with the government-backed office service organisation Vital.org. Government departments in Singapore pride themselves on paying their accounts on time and are penalised if they don't so KM&T will be assessing its electronic and paperwork systems for their 300 staff."

Scott said the healthcare system in Singapore was different to the UK's and within the public sector aspect there are nine polyclinics which are health centres providing GPs, nursing staff, dental services, x-rays and laboratory and blood facilities.

"We are working with the Hougang Polyclinic which is part of the NHG healthcare cluster to create a medical clinic which will have the best examples of medical practices as well as have an improved flow between patients and staff and KM&T will teach the staff to repeat and share their learnings across the other eight polyclinics," he said.

"Our third major contract is with DB Schenker to design a new spare parts distribution centre for Asia Pacific.

"Land is at a real premium in Singapore and we have been working with VW, and the architects for the distribution centre, to look at best practice procedures. We have reduced the floor space of the initial drawings to such an extent that we have already saved VW an estimated $20 million Singapore dollars by reducing the facility from three floors to two.

"There is no doubt that it has proved excellent commercial sense for KM&T to open an office in Singapore. Work is extremely busy and after bringing in consultants from the UK, Simon Bricknall to work on the polyclinics contract and Richard Etches to work on DB Schenker, we are in the process of recruiting local people for other projects."