PHOTO: JULIAN TAY FOR THE STRAITS TIMES

ONG Bee Chuan knows what it is like to have a hard life.

He grew up the eighth of 10 children in the family and when he was in his teens, 21 extended family members shared the same zinc roof in his kampung.

'We used to eat porridge every day and the highlight of a meal was a single can of preserved minced meat shared by everyone,' he said.

Now, the 51-year-old managing director of 01 Computer Systems, a 20-year-old IT solutions company, wants to do his part for the underprivileged.

Last month, 01Computer and HP teamed up to launch their Green Charity Program which aims to raise $10,000 for The Straits Times School Pocket Money Fund through an IT recycling project. 01 Computer's flagship business is selling IT consumables like storage tape drives and ink cartridges to businesses directly as well as through retail chains.

It was after spending about 10 years working in various sales positions that he and his siblings decided to strike out on their own and started 01 Computer in 1989. They chose the name because 0 and 1 represent the binary numbers - the bits and bytes - of computing.

'But we later realised it was good for marketing because we are always first on the list in telephone and business directories,' he said.

The company started off selling floppy disks and disk packs and included ink and toners in the mid-1990s.

'The IT industry was growing at that time and we figured that users would need these consumables just as cars need petrol,' he said.

At first, the company focused a lot on sourcing for products in Singapore and exporting them to emerging countries. But Bee Chuan realised that that had to change.

'Export worked in the early days because the manufacturers did not have a presence in the less developed countries. However, with globalisation, we saw that they would ultimately be everywhere,' he said.

So he switched to servicing local businesses both small and large and also the Government.

Today, 01 Computer is a major supplier of ink cartridges to leading retail chains here like Popular Bookstore, Courts, Harvey Norman and Best Denki. But the company has long moved from being a pure box pusher to providing business solutions to its customers.

For instance, it does not simply stock shelves when inventory is low. It recommends products with higher profit margins to retail chains too.

To do this, the company has a comprehensive product database with software which automatically tracks the demand of each product as well as profitability.

Bee Chuan realised from day one that IT would give his company a competitive edge.

The company was a five-man operation when it started. Even then, it invested about $10,000 to install a PC-based server with three computers hooked up to it, a huge investment for a small business 20 years ago.

'We believed we would be more productive if we shared files and one huge benefit was that we could mail merge against our customer database,' he added.

The company recorded $1 million in sales in its first year. Last year, sales hit $41 million.

The 43-strong company has an annual budget of $100,000 for both new equipment and upgrades.

The company does not just sell tape drives, it also helps the customer to print the bar codes and stick them on the tapes.

Among its six printers is a HP CLJ3550 which prints bar code labels. These are stuck on storage tape drives which the company supplies to data centres.

In turn, data centres need the bar codes to locate the thousands of tape drives stored in their huge facilities.

A good printer ensures that ink on the labels does not fade as this would make the bar codes unreadable, said Bee Chuan, explaining the value-added guarantee that his company provides.

'We don't just sell products. We sell solutions,' he said.

ginlee@sph.com.sg

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