Through structured discovery workshops, stakeholder interviews, and user journey mapping. The process typically takes 1–2 weeks and produces a detailed scope document, feature list, and technical architecture plan.
Read full answerOn Monday, 24 August 2026, our team put on hi-vis vests and spent the day walking Perodua’s vehicle stockyard at Sungai Choh, Rawang. We were not there to demo anything. We were there to stand in the middle of the operation, watch how finished vehicles actually move through the yard, and fly a drone over it to capture the landscape from above.
In short: an onsite visit is how you find the parts of an operation flow that never make it into a requirements document. In one day at Sungai Choh we mapped the outbound vehicle flow, saw where staff carry information in their heads instead of in a system, and captured aerial imagery of the full yard footprint. Every serious digitalisation project Advisory Apps has delivered in 14 years started with someone physically standing in the place the software was meant to serve.
What We Went to See at Sungai Choh
Perodua’s headquarters sits on a 522-acre site in Sungai Choh, Rawang, and it holds far more than an office. On that one plot are two vehicle manufacturing facilities — Perodua Manufacturing Sdn Bhd (PMSB) and Perodua Global Manufacturing Sdn Bhd (PGMSB), the latter opened in 2016 — plus a research and development facility with its own test track, a parts centre, a training centre, and the distribution stockyard we came to see. Combined, the two plants can build up to 320,000 vehicles a year.
The stockyard is the hinge between manufacturing and the dealer network. A car rolls off the assembly line, gets parked, waits, and eventually leaves on a transporter bound for one of Perodua’s outlets. That sounds like three steps. It is not.
The visit at a glance
| Detail | |
|---|---|
| Date | Monday, 24 August 2026 |
| Site | Perodua vehicle stockyard, Sungai Choh, Rawang, Selangor |
| Purpose | Understand the yard landscape and outbound operation flow |
| Activities | Ground walkthrough, shuttle tour of the yard sectors, stakeholder interviews, drone aerial capture |
| Team | Advisory Apps business and engineering leads |
The Numbers Are Why the Yard Is Hard
Scale is what turns a simple process into a difficult one. In 2025 Perodua produced 370,370 vehicles and sold 359,904 — records on both counts, and an estimated 43.9% share of a Malaysian total industry volume of around 820,000 units. In the first half of 2026, Perodua and Proton together held roughly 67% of the market, and by April 2026 Perodua had already crossed 100,000 units for the year at 106,298 — the first brand to get there.
Average 370,370 units across a full calendar year and you get just over 1,000 vehicles a day passing through the system. Every one of them has a VIN, a model, a variant, a colour, a build date, a destination outlet, and a physical parking bay somewhere on the hardstand.
That last item is the interesting one. A vehicle’s location in a yard is a fact that changes constantly, is created by whoever moved the car, and is worth nothing five minutes after it goes stale. It is the hardest kind of data to keep accurate, and it is exactly the kind you cannot design for from a meeting room in Kuala Lumpur.
The outbound yard at Sungai Choh. Rows of finished units on the left, carrier transporters staged on the right, and a hardstand in between where the loading happens.
What a Requirements Document Cannot Tell You
We have delivered enough enterprise work for Perodua — the Perodua SA mobile platform across 225+ dealerships, the Digital Workshop System integrating 47+ connected devices at the Petaling Jaya service centre, and the Outlet Digitalization showroom kiosks — to know that a written brief is a starting point, not a specification.
Here is what onsite work surfaces that documents routinely miss:
- Physical constraints on the flow. Yard sectors, one-way lanes, turning circles for a car carrier, and a 20 km/h speed limit all shape what a workflow can realistically ask a person to do. A screen that requires a driver to stop and scan four times per movement is a screen that will be ignored.
- The undocumented handoffs. Between “vehicle produced” and “vehicle dispatched” there are handoffs between production, yard operations, quality, and the transport contractor. The formal process describes some of them. Staff describe more.
- Where the real record lives. In most yards, some portion of the truth lives on a clipboard, a WhatsApp group, or in the memory of the person who has worked there for eleven years. Finding those is the whole point of the visit.
- Connectivity reality. Open hardstand, metal roofing, hundreds of metres between sectors. Signal quality is a design input, not an afterthought — it is why our Outlet Digitalization kiosks were built offline-first in the first place.
- Who actually has to use it. A yard marshal wearing gloves in 34°C heat is a different user than a manager reviewing a dashboard. Both matter, and only one of them is in the meeting.
The shuttle tour through the sectors. The 20 km/h sign is a small detail that tells you a lot about how long any yard movement takes.
Why We Flew a Drone Over the Yard
The second half of the day was aerial. A yard this size cannot be understood from the ground — you can walk a sector, but you cannot see the whole footprint, the sector boundaries, the lane structure, or how the loading hardstand relates to the storage rows.
Drone photogrammetry solves that. Flying a grid pattern over a site produces overlapping imagery that reconstructs into an orthomosaic and a 3D model; industrial stockyard surveys of this type can generate a full orthomosaic and digital elevation model in under 30 minutes of flight time. What we get back is an accurate, to-scale spatial reference of the actual site — not a facilities drawing from 2016.
That matters because spatial accuracy is the foundation of any yard visualisation. If you eventually want a screen where a manager sees the yard as it is, with vehicles positioned where they physically sit, the underlying map has to be real. This is the direction the industry is moving: the global finished-vehicle logistics market was valued at roughly USD 182.8 billion in 2026 and is forecast to reach USD 228.5 billion by 2030, and the trends named as driving that growth are digital twin fleet management and autonomous yard management.
To be clear about what this post is and is not: the drone shoot and the walkthrough were discovery work. We are not announcing a system here, and we are not describing one. What we are describing is the method — and the method is that you earn the right to design something by first understanding the place it has to work in.
Loading in progress. The transporter is the constraint the whole outbound flow bends around — it arrives when it arrives, and the yard has to have the right cars ready.
How We Run Enterprise Discovery
Advisory Apps has delivered 200+ projects since 2012, and our digital transformation engagements follow the same discovery sequence regardless of industry:
| Stage | What happens | Output |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Onsite observation | Walk the operation during a normal working day. No demos. | Annotated flow of what actually happens |
| 2. Stakeholder interviews | Talk to operators, supervisors, and management separately | The three different versions of the process |
| 3. Landscape capture | Measure the physical and system environment — including aerial survey where scale demands it | To-scale spatial and systems reference |
| 4. Gap analysis | Compare documented process against observed process | The list of what is actually broken |
| 5. Scoped proposal | Only now do we propose modules, phases, and effort | Costed scope with a defensible basis |
Most failed enterprise projects skip straight to stage five. That is why they fail — the scope was built on a description of the operation rather than the operation itself.
The building blocks that follow discovery are usually recognisable: asset tracking for unit-level location, fleet management for movement and transporter coordination, a 3D asset manager where spatial visualisation is needed, and a dashboard builder for the management layer. But which of those apply, and how, is a question you answer after the site visit, not before.
Key Takeaways for Your Own Digitalisation
If you are scoping an operational system — a yard, a warehouse, a workshop, a fleet, a plant floor — three things from this visit are worth borrowing:
- Insist that your vendor comes onsite before quoting. If a software company can scope your operation without visiting it, they are scoping a generic system and you will pay for the gap later.
- Budget for discovery as a phase, not a formality. A day on site is cheaper than a rebuild. Perodua’s own supplier-side digitalisation push through the MIDA–Perodua Digital Transformation Ecosystem Programme, initiated in 2020, works on the same premise — capability first, then technology.
- Capture the physical reality properly. Floor plans go stale. Drone survey, laser measurement, or a proper walkthrough gives you a baseline you can design against for years.
We came away from Sungai Choh with a flow map, a set of aerial captures, and a much shorter list of assumptions than we walked in with. That is what a good site visit is for.
End of the walkthrough, 24 August 2026.
Finished units waiting for a transporter. Every one has a destination outlet already assigned.
If you are running an operation that has outgrown its spreadsheets and you want a team that will come and look at it before telling you what it costs, book a free consultation. We will walk your site, map the flow, and come back with a scope built on what we actually saw — the same way we approached Sungai Choh. You can also browse our projects to see how this discovery process turns into delivered systems.
Sources: Perodua — About Us · paultan.org — Perodua 2025 sales and production records · paultan.org — Proton and Perodua market share 1H 2026 · Research and Markets — Finished Vehicles Logistics Market Report 2026 · Identec Solutions — Finished Vehicle Logistics 2026 · MIDA — MIDA and Perodua strategic partnership
