DRB-HICOM Group Selects Lapasar to Transform Procurement Across Its Entire Ecosystem
Large conglomerates face a unique procurement challenge.
While strategic sourcing often receives significant attention, thousands of low-value, high-frequency purchases continue to consume a disproportionate amount of procurement resources. Office supplies, MRO items, IT accessories, pantry goods, safety equipment, operational consumables, and countless other indirect purchases create an administrative burden that scales with every subsidiary, business unit, and location.
This is why the onboarding of the DRB-HICOM Group onto Lapasar marks a significant milestone in Malaysia’s procurement digitalisation journey.
As one of Malaysia’s largest and most diversified conglomerates, DRB-HICOM operates across multiple sectors including automotive, aerospace and defence, banking, postal services, properties, and various service businesses. Managing procurement across such a diverse ecosystem requires more than just supplier access—it requires governance, visibility, speed, and operational efficiency. (DRB-HICOM)
Objective 1: Making Long-Tail Spend Faster, Better and More Cost Effective
In most enterprises, procurement teams spend substantial time processing low-value purchases that individually appear insignificant but collectively represent millions in annual expenditure.
The challenge isn’t simply finding suppliers.
The challenge is obtaining competitive pricing, ensuring policy compliance, managing approvals, validating vendors, tracking deliveries, processing invoices, and maintaining visibility across hundreds or thousands of transactions.
By consolidating long-tail procurement through Lapasar’s digital marketplace, DRB-HICOM companies gain access to a centralised procurement ecosystem that simplifies sourcing and purchasing across thousands of commonly purchased business items.
Instead of sourcing the same products repeatedly from fragmented suppliers, procurement teams can leverage a standardised platform with pre-vetted vendors, transparent pricing, consolidated reporting, and digital workflows.
The result is straightforward:
Faster sourcing cycles Reduced administrative workload Improved spend visibility Greater purchasing control Lower transaction costs Increased supplier competition
Most importantly, procurement professionals can spend less time processing routine purchases and more time focusing on strategic initiatives that create measurable business value.
Objective 2: Increasing Procurement Efficiency Across Every Subsidiary
One of the biggest challenges faced by large groups is maintaining procurement consistency across multiple companies.
Different subsidiaries often develop their own purchasing habits, supplier networks, approval structures, and operational processes. While this provides flexibility, it can also create inefficiencies, duplicated effort, fragmented spend, and reduced visibility at the group level.
The Lapasar platform enables DRB-HICOM companies to operate within a common procurement framework while preserving the flexibility required by individual business units.
Through configurable approval workflows, procurement policies, budget controls, preferred vendor programmes, and centralised reporting, each subsidiary can purchase according to its operational needs while remaining aligned with broader group governance objectives.
This creates several immediate advantages:
Standardised procurement processes Improved compliance and audit readiness Better spend analytics across business units Reduced maverick spending Faster purchasing turnaround times Improved user experience for requestors and approvers
For procurement leaders, visibility becomes significantly clearer.
For employees, purchasing becomes significantly easier.
For management, spend becomes significantly more controllable.
Building the Future of Enterprise Procurement
Digital procurement is no longer simply about replacing paper processes.
The next generation of procurement platforms must deliver measurable outcomes: lower costs, faster cycle times, improved governance, and better user experiences.
The partnership between DRB-HICOM and Lapasar reflects a broader shift occurring across leading Malaysian enterprises. Procurement is increasingly being recognised not as an administrative function, but as a strategic capability that directly impacts operational efficiency, working capital, and organisational performance.
As the DRB-HICOM Group continues its transformation journey across its diverse portfolio of businesses, the adoption of a unified procurement platform represents another step towards building a more connected, efficient, and data-driven enterprise.
For Lapasar, it represents the opportunity to help one of Malaysia’s most respected conglomerates simplify procurement at scale while empowering procurement teams to focus on what matters most—creating value for the business.