NCS was founded in 1981 when the Government of Singapore embarked upon initiatives to harness information technology for both the public and private sectors. It was restructured as a commercial entity in 1996 and a year later, became a wholly owned subsidiary of SingTel Group. NCS adopted its current name on 1 November 2003.
SingTel Aeradio was a communication engineering services provider in airport consultancy, facility management services, engineering and radio communications, C4ISR*, intelligent building, smart security solutions, transportation solutions, IT infrastructure system, IT Security training and certification, telecommunication and multimedia. In 2002, SingTel Aeradio merged with NCS, retaining much of its identity as NCS Communications Engineering.
On 1 Aug 2019, the SingTel appointed Ng Kuo Pin as the new chief executive officer of NCS after the former CEO Chia Wee Boon had left.
Products and services
The company offers several services including consultancy, development, integration, infrastructure management, and BPO to customers from the public, education, financial services, insurance, healthcare, life sciences, logistics, telecommunications, utilities and transportation sectors.
On 16 February 2019, the Ministry of Health released statement that there was an error in the computer system, managed by NCS, for the Community Health Assist Scheme. The error miscalculated the amount of health care subsidies applicants could receive through means-testing their income information. Thus, approximately 1,300 people received lower subsidies and 6,400 people received higher subsidies. The first discrepancy in a result of a CHAS card holder was detected on 24 September 2018 by MOH. NCS was informed immediately, which then initially attributed the issue to intermittent network connection problems. Between 9 October 2018 and 2 November 2018, another 5 more discrepancy cases were detected and thus leading into a deeper investigation. In November 2018, NCS Pte Ltd traced the cause of the discrepancies to a software version issue used on a server used by the system. The identified issue occurred during a migration of the system to another government data centerin September 2018. The software version issue was resolved as a resolution to an unrelated slow performance issue on 10 October 2018. However, incorrect results that were generated between 18 September 2018 and 10 October 2018 remained. Remedial actions were then carried out by MOH and NCS to assess impact on the affected applicants. MOH would then work with grant scheme administrators and healthcare institutions to follow up with notifications and reimbursement to the affected applicants. MOH reportedly had the intention to recover costs and expenses due to this incident from NCS as allowed in the contract between them.
