SINGAPORE - Faced with dwindling sales, a two-decade-old company was compelled to take on digitalisation.
It has not been an easy journey for Mr Simon Lee, director of Synergetic Beauty System, especially with a small workforce with older employees.
The company, which sells and distributes hair-care products and tools, consists of a five-person team. All except one are aged between 50 and 60.
Business-to-business transactions from regulars make up about 70 per cent of its revenue, and transactions from walk-in new clients make up the remainder. Such new clients were non-existent during the circuit breaker last year.
Mr Lee, 56, said: "It triggered me immediately to think of alternative ways to keep the company going. There's no way; we cannot escape from (going digital). Even after the circuit breaker, it has been a very slow path to recovery."
Around last August, Mr Lee decided to enrol the company in the SMEs Go Digital programme to look for greener pastures. He explored how he could move the company online.
After deciding to focus on selling directly to consumers rather than other businesses, he took the plunge and created a company website where customers can view products and make online purchases.
But generating online sales was just one part of the company's digitalisation strategy.
Mr Lee also decided to revamp its back-end processes as most operations were still being done manually. For example, the company was still issuing cheques and hard-copy payslips, and recorded each employee's annual leave allowance in notebooks.
Adopting human resource management software and digital stock management inventory software helped it to reduce long administrative hours, which resulted in time-saving costs of about 20 per cent.
Mr Lee said that while these solutions have reaped benefits for the company, the older workers were at first apprehensive and resistant to the changes.
"It's natural for them to have this fear of digital tools. They were afraid of memorising the steps on how to use these new solutions. It took a lot of trial and error and now they are slowly building up confidence."
Mr Lee now hopes to be able to reach out to more consumers, especially the younger crowd, as the company continues to expand its online presence via its website.
"There are bound to be challenges every year. But... we do see something to gain from going digital," he said.