Across Malaysia, retail is no longer just about price and convenience. Shoppers are paying closer attention to how the brands they support operate. According to PwC's 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey, APAC consumers are willing to pay nearly 11% above average price for sustainably produced goods. Closer to home, a YouGov study found that 67% of Malaysian consumers prefer brands that are sustainable.

For MYDIN, one of Malaysia's leading retail groups operating a chain of hypermarkets, supermarkets, and emporiums, that shift aligns with a direction the company has been committed to for three years. Across its malls and hypermarkets, MYDIN has been rolling out concrete sustainability initiatives — including solar panel installations, CO2 emissions tracking, and energy savings monitoring across sites.

"Sustainability is central to what we are building at MYDIN. These initiatives represent a long-term commitment to our customers, to our investors, and to the communities we operate in. And for us, that means making sure the way we manage and deliver on these commitments is just as strong as the commitments themselves."

- Rizal Bin Salim, Director of Property Development & Mall

The harder question was always operational: how do you manage, track, and report on a growing portfolio of sustainability projects across a large, multi-site organization with the rigor that leadership and stakeholders expect?

Starting with the right foundation

When MYDIN's IT team selected Lark as the company's digital transformation partner, the goal was to bring structure, visibility, and collaboration into how MYDIN's teams work across the organization. The ESG program was one of the first areas to take shape, where MYDIN's project management team needed a structured way to manage its sustainability initiatives at scale.

What the ESG program looks like on Lark

Projects tracked in real time, visible to the right people

Project status was previously tracked across spreadsheets and communicated through emails and messaging apps, with leadership requesting updates to get the current picture.

On Lark, every initiative has a standardized record: project leader, start date, milestones, and status. Access is structured by role: project owners update their own entries, leadership views a live dashboard. Version conflicts and delayed updates are no longer part of the process.

Budget management that keeps pace with projects

Each initiative starts with a financial baseline established upfront. Actual spend is tracked against estimates continuously. What was previously maintained across individual Excel files, reconciled manually, and reviewed at fixed points is now in one place: current, accessible, and free from version control issues.

ESG data in one place, visualized across sites

Every site generates meaningful data: CO2 emissions reduction, energy savings, annual cost savings, installed solar capacity. Previously distributed across multiple systems with no unified view, all ESG information is now stored on Lark Base.

Base Extensions display map-based visualizations of site-level data directly, giving leadership a geographic view of where initiatives stand across the network.

Board reporting that takes days, not weeks

MYDIN's project management team regularly prepares performance presentations for the Board of Directors covering project progress, budget variance, environmental impact, and strategic recommendations. Consolidating those inputs previously took a minimum of two weeks. The team now completes the same cycle in two days, with a single source of truth feeding directly into reports and dashboards — an 86% reduction in reporting time.

"Before, pulling together a Board report meant two weeks of chasing data across systems and making sure everyone was working from the same version. Now it takes two days, and I know what's in it is accurate. That time goes back into actually managing the projects."

– Ilanchelian Chandran, Assistant Project Manager

Beyond the ESG lens

The challenges MYDIN faced are not unique to sustainability programs. Projects are tracked in separate files, budgets reconciled manually, data spread across systems, and reporting cycles that take weeks. These exist across any large enterprise managing complex, multi-site operations.

MYDIN's ESG program is where these issues came together first. The same infrastructure now supports wherever the business needs it next. For a retail group at MYDIN's scale, that matters. It is the difference between talking about responsible retailing and being able to prove it, program by program, year by year.

Interested in how Lark supports enterprise transformation? [Get in touch]