The Digital Revolution of Swagelok Singapore
Be it in the way Swagelok Singapore operates or the way they handle customer experience, their mission is simple – to provide excellent solutions by leveraging on resources, strengths, and capabilities with a directed focus on marketing and distribution. As a fluid solutions provider for the Oil & Gas, Chemical and Refining and Semiconductor markets. Swagelok Singapore plays a vital role in maintaining high standards of customer service that aligns to its principal Swagelok, the billion-dollar global MNC manufacturing that sells fluid system components, assemblies and related services on a massive scale.
To evolve and adapt to the highly competitive business landscape, Swagelok Singapore’s CEO, Zhuohan Cai, acknowledges the importance of digitisation, which he strongly believes is key to making Swagelok Singapore more efficient, task-oriented and cost-effective.
How has their company embarked on the road to digitisation with Canon? We sat down with Karin Yap (Head of Operations), Gi Chih Whang (Customer Service Representative), Joey Chow (IT Specialist) and Angie Ng (Customer Service Manager) to find out where Canon fits into this ongoing journey.
Why Canon?
Gi: We did a comparison with other competitors and found Canon to be a one-stop solution. Canon provided both the software and hardware in one package; most of the others provided them separately. The hardware and software that they provide are able to meet our requirements, which is something we found lacking from other competitors.
Karin: Another thing that we really like about Canon is their good customer service. The Canon team is very knowledgeable and familiar with their products, allowing us to cultivate a good relationship and partnership. Their staff are all very helpful, friendly and responsive. We’re able to go to them with any problems we have, and they’ll be able to solve them quickly and offer alternative solutions. We appreciate the rapport that has been built!
What are some of the challenges faced before implementing Canon solutions?
Gi: Previously, we were using old dot matrix printers which were noisy and slow. We used 4-ply carbon copy papers for the printing of our delivery orders and it was a tedious and labour-intensive process as we had to manually load the papers in the printer, which frequently broke down as well. This resulted in many man hours being wasted!
Angie: Before we implemented Canon’s Therefore™ Document Management Solution, it would take about 2 to 3 hours per person a day to handle all this manual work. So, if you do the math, 10 people would take about 30 hours a day! With Canon’s solutions, we can now do our jobs more efficiently. Our files are archived digitally, which eliminates manual filing and retrieval altogether. On top of time-savings, we also save valuable space. Human errors can be avoided as well. Overall, it’s a win-win situation.
What was the implementation process like?
Angie: The Canon team, together with our IT team, did a very good job in providing very comprehensive training for our staff, which definitely helped up their confidence level in adopting these new processes.
Joey: The Canon team came down to give us a primary training session. On our end, we then conducted additional training sessions for a handful of staff who weren’t so tech-savvy and needed additional guidance.
What are some of the cost and/or time savings that you experience with the new solution?
Angie: We have a huge customer database of over 1,600 customers. In terms of key customers with whom we have daily transactions, the number can easily come up to anything from 300 to 500. This is a significant volume of customers and their files take up a lot of space. In fact, many of these files are boxed up due to space constraints. In the past, when our staff wanted to retrieve any files, it was a laborious process as they had to locate the box (out of many other boxes) in our warehouse or cupboards, take out everything to locate the specific file before putting everything back again. Everything was in hard copy format. There were some documents that we could refer to on our computer system, but if we needed a signed copy we had to retrieve the physical copy, which could be buried somewhere in our stacks of papers.
Joey: We had 12,000 or so transactions from January to June this year alone. So just imagine the amount of documentation our staff had to sift through in order to retrieve a particular document. However, with Canon’s Therefore™ Document Management Solution, everything is solved by the simple click of a button.
How important is it to have the right technology for the job?
Joey: For Swagelok Singapore, quality print and speed is very important. Having the right technology in place for our processes to ensure smooth workflow and high productivity is like finding the right key for a lock. To open up the correct door to the correct process, you’ll need the correct technology. It only makes sense to implement digitisation for our company as our staff should not be spending their time on manual sorting or filing but instead, focus on their daily tasks at hand. Canon’s Therefore™ Document Management Solution has really helped us streamline existing processes and improve our productivity levels.
Angie: Now our customer service staff have more time to help customers resolve their issues or fulfil their orders rather than having to allocate time for filing and manual sorting. This has improved our customer service satisfaction too!
For more success stories on business solutions Canon has provided for our valued customers, follow Canon Singapore on LinkedIn for the latest updates!