The Singapore government made a significant announcement last month.

To bring widespread contact tracing to the city-state in southeast Asia, TraceTogether tokens, which use Bluetooth technology, were distributed nationwide.

The goal is to achieve 60-70% population adoption of the TraceTogether program, which comprises a smartphone app and the token, by the end of the year as the country moves slowly to ease measures aimed to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

PCI Private Limited, an electronics manufacturing service provider based in Singapore, is one of two bidders who were awarded contracts by Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech) to design and manufacture batches of tokens, with the company providing the initial 300,000 tokens distributed to vulnerable seniors in late June.

Company officials say It was an unprecedented display of speed to market.

They credit two driving factors.

The entire world is desperately seeking answers in the COVID-19 fight and the company was energized to contribute.

In PCI’s case, Platinum Equity’s call to action to all its portfolio companies and senior leadership’s guidance in response to the pandemic ignited a flurry of ingenuity, according to one company official.

“I think we were very energized to speed things up and move things along as fast as it can because time was of the essence, because the infection rates kept going up,” PCI director of advanced engineering Chi Wei Yap said. “How leadership helped is they gave us resources. They arranged daily meetings and daily calls to make sure there were no bottlenecks because the delivery schedule of the product is very tight and it’s supposed to be delivered in such a short period of time – much shorter than anything PCI has ever done in the past.”


“The utmost priority at that time was to make sure that the company had enough liquidity to tide through the very unpredictable downturn of the economy,” PCI CEO Teo Eng Lin said. “The operation team of P.E. initiated this very strong mandate at that time, making sure the company instituted swift action to manage costs and be very attentive to details and move quickly to make sure that cost containment actions are being implemented with the objective to preserve cash.”


Catalyst for innovation

With government-imposed shutdowns beginning to negatively impact the global economy, Platinum announced the firm’s top priorities:

  • Protect the well-being of employees and their families.
  • Ensure the continuity of business.
  • Mitigate the impact of the crisis on the firm’s portfolio companies.
  • Pursue new opportunities in the market.

The operations team directed portfolio companies to preserve liquidity, reduce costs and prepare for an extended downturn.

Platinum acquired PCI in April 2019.

“The utmost priority at that time was to make sure that the company had enough liquidity to tide through the very unpredictable downturn of the economy,” PCI CEO Teo Eng Lin said. “The operation team of P.E. initiated this very strong mandate at that time, making sure the company instituted swift action to manage costs and be very attentive to details and move quickly to make sure that cost containment actions are being implemented with the objective to preserve cash.”

The fourth priority to pursue opportunities loomed large for PCI.

GovTech developed the Bluetooth protocol for the TraceTogether smartphone app which was first rolled out nationwide in March 2020. The agency needed to quickly design and manufacture a portable device to expand TraceTogether coverage to provide another option for those who don’t own a cellphone.

By co-designing with GovTech and producing a product in eight weeks, PCI won the initial bid to produce 300,000 tokens.

“They had the mobile app, they had the back-end operation, but they did not have the hardware,” PCI senior vice president Thomas Handojo said. “That is where PCI became a perfect match for that because we are a manufacturer, we are a hardware provider.”

How it works
TraceTogether tokens work by exchanging Bluetooth signals with other tokens or mobile phones running the app nearby. Records of such encounters are stored locally on each user’s device for up to 25 days.

The user will be contacted by the government’s contact tracing team for the data download only if they are confirmed to be infected with COVID-19. This allows the government to trace people in close contact with COVID-19 patients very rapidly. The battery life of the device lasts six to nine months, and the token does not require charging.

It works without an Internet connection and user data is encrypted and cannot be remotely extracted from the token.

PCI’s experience in creating solutions for Internet of Things technology was vital. But the process still needed execution, something that will serve the company well in the future.

“PCI is a stronger company because we learned how to cope with expediting material to speed up the development and the production process,” Chi said. “We learned how to engineer and turn things around very quickly and which suppliers would be able to support us quicker than other competitors.

“We learned how to manage all the various variations, which I don’t think in such a short time that PCI has ever done.”

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