AE Aequitas Sdn Bhd

Business Case at a Glance

AE Aequitas Sdn Bhd is a fast-growing safety services and engineering company in Malaysia that specialises in fire protection systems. Their services include maintenance of the fire protection system. For that, we offer Aequitas an efficient fire extinguisher management system powered by Zoho. They have been running things manually, and after a fateful meeting with Aplikasi, they decided to go with Zoho People and Zoho Expense for its 33 employees thus far. With the dedication and help from Aplikasi, the implementation was a success, covering two locations in just over a month.

Company Background

Aequitas is a fire extinguisher service company that has served and still serves reputable MNCs in Malaysia. With the recent advancement in technology and the pressing need to keep up, the company is desperate for a solution that would help. However, cost is a major concern for them, as it is for most SMEs. After a meeting in an unlikely venue—the hospital cafeteria—its CEO, Ridzuan, was awed by the depth of what Zoho People and Expenses had to offer at such an affordable price and decided to get on board right away.

AE Aequitas Sdn Bhd evolved from another company and is now primarily focused on providing fire extinguisher services throughout Malaysia. The company has three operations centres covering different parts of Malaysia. Currently, it has 33 dedicated employees, most of whom are on the field. Ridzuan, the CEO of the company, is the one who’s responsible for the start of the company’s digital transformation journey. With a lot more challenges coming their way, Ridzuan and his dedicated team aspire to fully transform their business with other Zoho apps as well.

The Challenge

Prior to their engagement with Aplikasi, all their jobs namely work monitoring, claim processing, attendance, and collaboration—were done manually. Because the operations team's jobs require a lot of traveling, there are a lot of claims. The whole process of applying for claims and approving them took the company two weeks per month to settle them. This job involves the finance department, the clerk, and also the HR department, and the 2-week cycle is killing their productivity.

The next phase involved heavily configuring and customising Zoho CRM to be a Fire Extinguisher Servicing System. Previously, as with their HR processes, everything was done manually, and there was no centralised database for all their assets. Technicians have their own logbooks for deliveries and pick-ups, and as the process is analogue, there is no transparency as well. Tanks' whereabouts cannot be traced should they be lost, and this is a major problem.

Finding the Solution

Ridzuan (Aequitas CEO) never knew about Zoho before he met us. All he knew then was that he needs to find a solution fast, but he needs to find the one he can pay for. He told this to his friend, who happens to be a mutual friend of Aplikasi’s founder, Azlan. In just two days, the meeting was set. Upon explanation and a short demo by Aplikasi, Ridzuan decided that every problem his company was having could be solved by Zoho People and Zoho Expense. On top of that, the price tag is exactly what he is looking for.

Aplikasi is a consultant partner for Aequitas, promising a smooth-sailing implementation of Zoho People and Zoho Expense. Aequitas does not have any IT-savvy personnel or change management professionals, so that’s where Aplikasi comes in. With years of experience in handling change management projects and SAP implementation and consultation, Aplikasi is convinced that they are able to help Aequitas end-to-end. Aplikasi also helped in redefining and restructuring Aequitas business processes that would otherwise be inefficient and time-consuming.

Implementations & Results

The whole implementation process which includes requirement gathering, customization and settings, review, fixes, training, and user acceptance test (UAT) only took a month to complete. The company notices an immediate improvement in their business processes after going live. In their claims process for example, it took them 2 weeks per month to settle everything; from claim applications to verification, approval, and reimbursement as the operation team’s work is mostly on the go. Hundreds of papers are documented every month to store the receipts and application forms. Three departments: Human Resource, Administration, and Finance would be busy handling the claim process. Zoho Expense immediately eliminates all the paperwork, and what’s most apparent is that it reduces 80% of the whole cycle process from 10 days to just 2 days.

With Zoho Expense, nobody has to be physically in the office to submit and approve the claims, and the capture receipt function in Zoho Expense makes it possible for the receipts to be stored without wasting papers and space. As for their leave management, the same benefit of saving paper can be observed. Now, with the convenience of the Zoho People mobile app, both requesters and approvers can do their jobs on the go. Attendance tracking and remote working monitoring are also possible now, promoting transparency and ensuring resources are being spent appropriately and responsibly.

The Fire Extinguisher Management System proved to be a challenging task indeed, as a lot of customization and configuration needed to be done to the CRM. The implementation focused on transparent and real-time database updates from each technician and each pickup and delivery. Having it integrated with Zoho Forms has made it possible for the technicians on the field to transfer information to the back office for further processing. The implementation also involves scanning devices and barcode printers, which would have the numbers generated from CRM automatically and later be used in asset tracing.