Ryan Chioh, Executive Director, Far East Flora.com,

Having too many customer orders is a sure sign of blossoming trade but as Far East Flora.com has discovered, it can also cause headaches, especially when you don't have the right tools to manage the administrative overload. Ryan Chioh reveals how integrating the firm's front- and back-end IT systems became one of the smartest business decisions he made.

Have you noticed any differences in the way SMEs today view the use of IT in business?
Some of the SME heads I've spoken with are adopting technology quite aggressively. For example, in food manufacturing, they're using PDAs (personal digital assistants) to take orders. And in the pest busting business, they're using wireless or handphones to notify their workforce when the pest is caught. The most recent group I've heard of, debt collectors, are using PDAs too. So the level of adoption has definitely changed.

Florists like us are also adopting technology quite aggressively. We've deployed ERP (enterprise resource planning) and CRM (customer relationship management) systems, and linking them directly to the Web site to improve our customers' shopping experience. So I definitely see SMEs aggressively adopting IT.

What is driving them to adopt IT so aggressively?
Many companies recognize that to improve business competitiveness, the use of IT will definitely help to cut down wastage. For example, it previously took us 20 minutes to take an order by phone. Today, we take orders via the Internet, and that takes us about five to eight minutes to close an order. So huge time savings there.

On top of that, there are administrative savings. In the past, because everything was handwritten, you would get errors due to poor handwriting. With computerization today, everything is printed out and that minimizes the margin for error… The other huge benefit is in customer records management. Previously, we couldn't keep our customers' records and as a result, repeat customers had to give us their personal information every time they placed an order. Today, we have the customers' information in our system, and all customers have to do is give us their credit card details.

What were the other drivers for automating the backend?
The Internet was probably the biggest trigger. We couldn't cope with the volume of orders that was coming via the Internet. There was no way we could cope, especially during peak periods. I had to double or triple the customer service workforce just to process the orders. There was administrative overload. We had to download the orders, re-key the information into the system, and then manually write down the work orders on paper to be passed on to the operations side for processing. It wasn't seamless. So that was extremely taxing on administration. Orders would get mistyped, orders wrongly-taken.

The other issue had to do with staff morale. When staff works long hours, their morale goes down. And we're not talking about long hours just for a few days, but more like a stretch of a few weeks. And let's not forget you have to pay overtime, so in that sense, we had to find a solution.

So knowing that this would happen the next year, we knew we should seriously consider integrating the back end with the front end. The back end was automated in January 2001, and orders flowed seamlessly to the back end. It cut down a lot of processing time. Today, everything works beautifully.

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