KULAI Municipal Council (MPKu) has gained international recognition after winning an award in Singapore for its Kulai Fast Lane (KFL).
The local council clinched the Malaysia Public Sector Initiative of the Year – Regulatory award at GovMedia Conference and Awards 2026 held in Singapore.
Outgoing MPKu president Mohd Hafiz Aliman said the award recognised the council’s efforts in improving public service delivery through innovation and regulatory reforms.
“The KFL, which streamlines the physical development project approval process for industrial and investment purposes, has helped speed up approvals and created ease of doing business.
“The international recognition also reinforced the success of the initiative, which had previously received acknowledgement from Chief Secretary to the Government Tan Sri Shamsul Azri Abu Bakar,” he said when chairing MPKu’s July full board meeting.
The initiative enables development applications to be processed in parallel, reducing approval times for development plans to fewer than 18 days and shortening overall project implementation from up to 24 months to between 11 and 13 months.
Hafiz said the initiative strengthened investor confidence, helping to attract investments that might otherwise have gone to neighbouring countries.
“The KFL has enabled us to bring more investors into Malaysia, particularly Johor, by making the approval process faster and more efficient.”
He said the award reflected MPKu’s continued commitment to enhancing service delivery to the public, investors and stakeholders through high-impact initiatives, with KFL serving the local council as one of the best practices and benchmarks for local authorities nationwide.
Hafiz also attributed the achievement to the collective efforts of MPKu staff, technical agencies, industry players and strategic partners who had supported the public service transformation agenda.
The recognition, he said, would spur MPKu to continue introducing new approaches driven by innovation, digitalisation and artificial intelligence to ensure faster, more transparent and more effective service delivery for the public and stakeholders.
Prior to the implementation of KFL, the development approval process involved multiple procedures across various federal, state and local agencies, resulting in repeated submissions and lengthy project implementation timelines.
MPKu addressed these challenges by introducing a stakeholder-oriented framework that integrates the requirements of investors and technical agencies into a single approval process.
