"In the old days, each plant would have an engineer and a team of operators running it, but our aim now is to bring all the engineers together into an operations hub," he says.

"While this happens elsewhere in the world, mainly for cost reasons, we're doing this in South and East Asia to concentrate our talents together.
"Since most of our plants are operating at 99% uptime, meaning they are operating 99% of the time, they are stable and the engineers don't really have to do anything [at the plant]," Wong continues. "So, while you still have some operators and technicians on site, we'll have a hub of engineers concentrated in the ROC looking after 30 to 40 plants, which offers a challenging and more rewarding environment for them."

Greater Kuala Lumpur wasn't The Linde Group's initial choice to set up the ROC. It was also considering India and the Philippines and set up a pilot ROC in Singapore five years ago to ensure it understood the equipment and infrastructure requirements and other resource needs.

"The ROC was never intended to be in Singapore though. We wanted somewhere more cost-effective and we looked at India because of its talent pool," says Wong.

"But other things had to be taken into account as well: infrastructure reliability, employee turnover, an English-speaking talent pool, political stability, consistency in policymaking and other benefts. The country's liveability is also something to consider. It has to be a location where foreigners would be prepared to relocate as 20% of our engineers would be from plants in other countries."

The ROC now has 35 engineers and is hoping to employ up to 50 by the end of the year. Linde's target is to have a 80:20 ratio of Malaysian and foreign engineers and it has set a target of hiring 100 engineers by 2020.

In this way, the engineers get a taste of foreign work exposure and an opportunity to reassess their career path within the organisation by taking up senior positions in different countries.

"In the past, you would only focus on one plant [as an engineer], but now you have a breadth of plants to look at while learning about operating conditions outside Malaysia," Wong explains.

"For example, the power quality in Pakistan may not be as good as ours. This affects the reliability and continuous performance of the plant, so the man sitting behind that control in Shah Alam has to take cognisance of that."

To set the wheels in motion, Linde had to make a business case to the regional headquarters in Singapore on why Greater Kuala Lumpur should be selected as the ROC's location. InvestKL stepped in to help.