AVNET ASIA PTE LTD
Founded in 1921, Avnet is a FORTUNE 500 company headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. Its 15,700 global employees serve more than 2 million customers in over 125 countries. For nearly a century, Avnet has helped its customers and suppliers around the world realize the transformative possibilities of technology. Avnet’s connected ecosystem supports customers of all types at each stage of the product lifecycle. From providing a community platform to the know-how, Avnet’s design and supply chain capabilities, coupled with its global line card presence, fulfils the critical time-to-market needs for customers globally. This substantial scale and scope, along with partnerships with the world’s most innovative technology partners, makes Avnet one of the leading global distributors of electronic components and technology solutions provider.
Avnet Asia Pte Ltd entered Asia in 1995 and Singapore is the regional headquarter. Asia-wide, we have over 3,600 employees in 56 offices, 7 design centers, 6 logistics centers and 1 Programming Center. Today, Avnet Asia’s annual billings is about USD7B up from over USD1B in 2006. This is the dynamic growth region contributing to 40% of the global sales notwithstanding a difficult market place we operate in.
Avnet Value Proposition
Avnet is a global technology solutions company with an extensive ecosystem delivering design, product, marketing and supply chain expertise for customers at every stage of the product lifecycle. We transform ideas into intelligent solution, reducing the time, cost and complexities of bringing products to market.
Employer Branding
Avnet strives to be “Employer of Choice” in the electronics distribution industry. We have established recognition for sustainable HR practices and schemes from reputable external partners such as learning institutes and governmental organizations. In Singapore, this success is affirmed by the numerous awards and accolades that we have received such as “Leading HR Practices in Talent Management, Retention and Succession Planning” and “Leading HR Leader Award – Mr. James Tan” in 2013, “Leading HR Practises in Compensation & Rewards Management”, “Leading HR Practises in Performance Management (special mention) and “Excellence in C&B Strategy (Bronze) in 2016. As a company, we work towards ensuring an engaged and inclusive company culture to drive innovation and performance and this includes creating an attractive work environment for the different generations, ethnic groups as well as our female workforce.
Talent Development
Avnet Asia provides robust Learning & Development resources to employees for their personal and career development. These comprise of both a wide range of in-house instructed led programs, online learnings and external programs. We have a multi-level leadership development framework to equip our senior management, middle and first-line managers. We believe “Leaders as teachers” and have groomed a team of certified in-house facilitators who are capable of conducting specific programs from our flagship ‘Front Line Leadership’ programs, ‘Emerging Leaders Program’, ‘Change & Project Management’ to ‘Time Management’. There is also a team of business directors who are active facilitators of the highly impactful ‘Business Presentation skills’ workshop. DDI International has featured our Frontline Leadership Program in their publication as an exemplary best practice. Our Young Manager’s Program has been touted as the best practice in Avnet global.
From Performance Management to Performance Leadership
Our company went through three phases of performance evolution. The first being driving performance management, both individual and team performance. Team performance refers to section, department, division and country. The second phase focuses on performance leadership in our industry – industry leading workforce. In the current phase, our aim is for continued performance leadership with a sharp focus on productivity gains.
We take a two-pronged approach in our productivity journey, namely our productivity 10-40-10 program and Results Program. In 10-40-10, we aim to increase the productivity (MGP$) gain per FTE, while in the Results Program, we aim to harness the collective wisdom of employees of all levels to drive both incremental improvements as well as high impact value projects.
With the productivity 10-40-10, we award employees with spot bonuses – a percentage of the additional MGP$ generated, while for the Results Program employees are recognized with monetary rewards commensurating with the savings generated.
Compensation & Benefits
Avnet has developed a program to recognize our employees for their contributions and for going the extra mile outside their normal scope of work. The Reach Recognition program allows Managers with teams in different regions to recognize employees using a single system which fosters greater collaboration across regions by promoting peer to peer recognition using a common recognition vehicle across diverse locations. This program supports our organizational health initiatives by offering financial rewards to employees. Our nomination criteria exemplify our core values – Integrity, Objectivity, Know-how, Ingenuity, Empathy and Collaboration.
Avnet also recognizes employees for their commitment, dedication and service excellence. We award employees for their service milestone achievements in their career.
Employee Well Being and Avnet Cares
Annually, we set aside a Wellness Budget and Asia-wide Wellness Calendar. We organize specific wellness program activities by adopting the five elements of Employee Well-Being – Physical, Financial, Career, Social and Community.
We enhance the well-being of our employees with a holistic approach – Better body, better mind and better overall well-being. We encourage employees to participate in various wellness activities such as recreational games, Annual Dinner & Dance, social events and in-house initiatives.
Our employee-led volunteer initiative, Avnet Cares cultivates good corporate citizenship. We have participated in various programs such as SingTel Race against Cancer, a cook-out at Willing Hearts (a non-profit organization) and raising funds through an in-house charity food bazaar.
HR Effectiveness
In a rapidly changing workplace, HR is increasingly focused on transforming service delivery. By building alignment to key business performance initiatives, our HR professionals will then be well-positioned for more value-added roles which in turn, will enable us to better share limited resources, leverage on technology and improve performance metrics.
The setting up of the HR Service Center and HR Now portal has provided employees a digitalized 24/7 experience with increased self-service.
Conclusion
Avnet’s journey is one of continuous improvement and we strive for higher goals with each milestone that we achieved. This is evident with the improvements as well as initiatives that we set for ourselves to achieve each year. In the distribution industry, Avnet Singapore is much talked about as a people centric organization where employees can “Learn and Grow”!
