Image credit: FMT
Have you thought about doing maintenance servicing of your car during the current lockdown? You might be thinking that there’s no need to do anything since the car is hardly used during the MCO lockdown.
However, if the car is not used enough and the battery is already more than a year old, you’ll eventually have a problem starting the car. In this event, remember that your comprehensive motor insurance entitles you to call a hotline for mechanical assistance.
You should use the MCO downtime to service your car and support your local workshop. They would appreciate it because most of them have lost more than half their regular business.
A majority of our neighbourhood motor workshops have fewer than five workers including the boss himself. While they received a few hundred ringgit subsidy per worker during MCO 1.0, the amount dwindled during MCO 2.0 and finally, this MCO 3.0, there’s no money for workshops.
Workshop operators say that during MCO 2.0, there were applicants who received approval letters for the subsidy but the money never arrived.
In MCO 3.0, there’s the issue of applying for approval letters from the international trade and industry ministry to carry on operations. Motor and tyre workshops are included under the essential services category.
Mark (not his real name), who owns three motor workshops with about 10 staff each, said that getting the Miti letter required plenty of perseverance and keyboard pounding.
“We had to keep on reapplying for the letter on the Miti website. The first Miti letter came in a few days, and the last letter came after a week. We had to keep applying and checking day and night,” he said.
Most of the motor workshops in Malaysia operate in rented premises. While landlords were compensated by the tax department if they discount the rent by at least 30% during the first MCO, this time around, the landlords are also suffering from a shortage of cash and many are not extending rebates.
Workshops which finally received their Miti letter have reopened with a downsized crew as stipulated in the SOPs for this MCO period but there are only a few customers.
“Three customers a day,” said an operator.
Meanwhile, an observer questioned an initiative by a specialised automotive agency under Miti. This agency last week launched an enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform to propel the automotive industry forward.
“It’s strange that the Malaysia Automotive Robotics and IoT Institute is using government money to go into ERP solutions for carmakers.
“Name one car brand or component vendor that is going to use it, let alone integrate it into their OEM developed system. The ERP system is very sensitive to car brands. These are developed at HQ level with big software houses like SAP, never an unknown vendor like MARii. There is so much proprietary data inside an OEM that no independent vendor can come close to an OEM’s ERP,” said CSN (not his real name).
“With artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics, ERP systems of TenCent and Amazon are world class. Last year, BMW Group Region China even did a strategic cooperation with Alibaba to provide an end-to-end and online-to-offline digital experience for BMW’s China customers.
“MARii should be coming out with a strategy for helping small workshops survive the recovery (period of the pandemic), not an ERP solution which no brand wants and which they can easily afford with their own money,” he said.
But there may be other reasons why MARii is doing what it is doing. It could be symptomatic of the breakdown processes in the government’s machinery or a lack of cash to support workshops in the current MCO.
The traditional weekly post-Cabinet meetings are not being held. At the tactical level, the Miti investment committee is said to be hampered by absenteeism as some officials complain of lack of bandwidth or inability to connect.
“When Tok Pa (Mustapa Mohamed, the former Miti minister) was around, we would present our proposals to the committee, and if the KSU (ketua setiausaha or secretary-general) was convinced, he would present it to the minister who would then present it to the Cabinet for discussion and action. But I am made to understand from my colleagues that this SOP is not practised any more,” recalled a former Miti official who declined to be named.
Source: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/opinion/2021/06/21/support-your-local-workshop/