Abstract of Learning Case 1
Asian Agricultural Bank Training Center: Venturing Into Uncharted Markets
Asian Agricultural Bank Training Center (AABTC) commenced operations in mid-1986 to serve the training needs of its parent institution - Bank Pertanian Malaysia (BPM), a government-owned agricultural bank. BPM is on the verge of a complete overhauling as the government has decided for its privatization. Privatization has several implications for the Training Center as it departs from being a component of a government entity into a privatized institution. While nobody in the BPM hierarchy has stated the exact date, AABTC already has the foretaste of what is to come - its annual budget had already been slashed substantially. Thus, anticipating privatization, AABTC had embarked on an aggressive re-packaging of its training products so it could reach the wider markets. Even as this has faced rough sailing for top management's approval, AABTC is facing hard times in establishing its niche in a market that for the most part, remained unfamiliar. AABTC had also started to upgrade its facilities in anticipation of catering to more demanding external customers. Currently, the managers at the Training Center are facing the difficult ordeal of convincing their superiors at the Head Office of the needed reforms, both for the training products and their facilities, before they lose by default if privatization should happen sooner than anyone expected. Meanwhile, the bigger and well-equipped training centers around AABTC in Bangi had been consistently upgrading their facilities. Some are training centers of banks likewise, and AABTC feels it is racing against time in tapping what it believed as wide, yet, uncharted markets.
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This abstract is based on a learning case written by Daniel B. del Rosario, Jr., MDM'97, under the supervision of Prof. Soledad A. Hernando, Asian Institute of Management.
All case materials are prepared solely for the purposes of workshop discussion. The cases are neither designed nor intended as illustrations of correct or incorrect management of the problems or issues contained in the case.
This case was written for the International Workshop on Strategic Management and Marketing of Training, held from August 3 to 12, 1998. The workshop is a collaborative effort of World Bank Institute (WBI)/the World Bank, the Association of Development Financing Institutions in Asia and the Pacific (ADFIAP), and the Asian Institute of Management (AIM).
Copyright © World Bank Institute (WBI), 1998.
