Helping SMEs get up to date in the post-pandemic digital era

DESPITE the acceleration of digitalisation in the past few years, many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are still lagging behind in digital adoption.

An SME Malaysia survey showed that 51% of SMEs do not have any plans to digitise their businesses as they favour manual work procedures that are more familiar to them.

Noticing the industry gap in the business landscape, Di-Yan Ho worked with teams but still ended up spending countless hours in keeping track of paperwork while jumping through tedious processes in attaining workforce data that should have been easily accessed if it were digitised.

Meanwhile, Di-Yan’s childhood friend Shah Fariq Aizal Sha Ghazni notices the daily drudgery that the plantation workers from his previous company experienced, not to mention the effort it takes in reporting plantation activities without a proper system.

Realising this, Di-Yan and Shah Fariq joined hands to establish HAUZ in 2018 as the CEO and chief marketing officer, respectively.

“We realised that the same conundrum exists in many businesses within service industries everywhere in the world. Workforce and operation management was all done manually and this took a lot of time and was not cost-effective.

“In the end, it affects employers and the overall bottom line because teams managing employees would have to collect and consolidate all the reporting log books, punch in cards, and photos of on-site activities in a slideshow for every single project they have. The work is tedious, time-consuming and costly in terms of manpower and resources,” said Di-Yan.

To combat this inefficiency, HAUZ feature tools like a mobile time clock to track employee attendance, along with a workforce and operation analytics dashboard overview to allow access to all data like workforce activities, scheduling, live pins, operation interval e-reports.

Moreover, the platform houses an emergency button, financial planning tools, a touchdown feature to monitor and track team activities, employee store and timesheets, and a report generator.

Tools like the emergency button, which allows employers to receive comprehensive incident reports after unforeseen on-site emergencies, and the financial planner, which helps with company spending by applying the right budgeting strategy, are great advantages to business owners.

Additionally, the HAUZ platform is able to decrease administrative costs, giving businesses greater visibility into asset utilisation, costs and maintenance.

The app can generate custom reports to show employers specific statistics and relevant key performance indicators, among others, so that management teams can derive insights that can be used to make data-driven executive decisions.

Currently, HAUZ supports over 150 companies across 2,600 locations in Malaysia, helping these businesses save up to 50% of their operations cost. In the last year alone, HAUZ experienced a 160% growth and was recently chosen as one of 11 high-growth startups to receive investments from ScaleUp and Quest Ventures for further expansion. Moreover, the company has also established a presence in Singapore and Brunei.

To further cement its position as one of the main workforce management platforms in the region, HAUZ is aiming to assist small-scale enterprises to embrace digital solutions and automations that will ultimately boost efficiency and streamline day-to-day operations. – Oct 23, 2021

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