Success Story.
Every now and then, a company takes a hard existential look at itself and takes a bold step in a new direction to either ensure survival or the next step up in its growth to fulfil the greater potential. Under the tutelage and guidance of its founder, Mr. Tee Lian Hoe, Gard Inc has not only managed to survive 2 recessions, a global credit crisis and the ongoing pandemic, the company has became a homegrown power-house, competing toe to toe or even superseding well known international brands with beautifully crafted and curated products marketed under the brand AireGard and Houm. The 2020 economic slowdown globally hit the company hard, and it remains a challenge, even for any company, under these circumstances. Given these challenges, Gard Inc took a step back to regroup, strategize and take a bold step to initiate massive digitalisation changes to ensure the future survivability and sow the seeds for future growth in the region.
Partly funded by MDEC's Smart Automation Grant, the team started with identifying areas of which manual tasks slow down the process of getting finished goods to the end user. From sales and customer enquiries, managing leads, digital marketing through to warehousing and billing automation, the team tore through what was, to where they wanted to go.
The month of December and January were crunch time when multiple systems, under the strict timetable of MDEC's disbursement criteria, had to be rolled out and the implementation teams were under the gun to delivery in a short period of time. By leveraging on the expertise of Vlan.asia, Gard Inc. implemented a cloud first approach to digitalise their business. Starting with the back office communications and collaboration tools of Microsoft365, Gard Inc's employees are now able to conduct regular update huddles without physically meeting and spending unnecessarily on travel and logistics. This was especially useful when Covid19 lockdowns were enforced nationwide. It also was found that implementing small improvements to each employee's workspace such as adding a 2nd monitor, or installing a proper video conference speaker/microphone, also contributes tremendously to overall productivity growth.
The marketing team implemented tools to better manage their social media engagements, along with the ability to build campaign specific landing pages on the fly without needing to engage a 3rd party website developer with the introduction of Hubspot. The sales team also benefitted from the free CRM included to better manage and oversee sales pipeline and forecasting. Customer support was given a shot in the arm with the introduction of Zendesk, where all customer engagement channels, be it Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, emails, text, were streamlined and issues and conversations were tracked and no longer forgotten during peak periods with its award-winning service ticket and support tracking system, among other benefits it brings to the team. Both these cloud systems were integrated directly into Microsoft Teams for management to get up-to-date automated pipeline progress or SLA reports for real-time decision making.
With all these base cloud systems in place, the 2nd phase of automating processes is possible to truly become a company of the future.
Digitalisation is not difficult. It may not be smooth sailing all the way, where hiccups can occur during implementation due to operational blind spots, the overall objective of constant improvement and futurisation of any organisation should be at the forefront of every leader's mind to stay ahead in their industry to ensure its survivability and continue to thrive, post-Covid-19.
Here is a short 2 minutes intro on Digital Transformation. We will dive deeper during our webinar on the 30th of March. Register now to reserve your seat.
Digitalisation is not difficult. Efficiencies from improved processes contribute to growth and resource savings, achieved with systems you’re not using yet. Find out more on how to digitalise your business here and maybe even get it subsidised with available government grants.
Register for a free Digitalisation webinar to learn more about how we digitalised our business and subsidy funding options via current available government grants.
Date : 30th March 2021
Time : 2pm - 3pm
Speaker : Lance Cheang