Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

The current pandemic has amplified the importance and growth of digitalisation. In Malaysia, more and more businesses are embracing digitalisation and finding ways to manage their operations to adapt to the growing need for remote working practices, an increasingly competitive digital economy, and well, to survive and thrive despite all the challenges.

To help businesses get there, 6Biz Group, a Malaysian start-up, launched GoKudos, the first locally developed all-in-one smart office platform. The platform is designed to provide convenience and cost-efficiency to businesses as they no longer have to subscribe to multiple smart-office solutions.

According to Dato’ Vimmy Yap, Founding Chairman of 6Biz Group, GoKudos offers some exciting features that can really benefit digitally transforming businesses. The platform’s three main solutions include:

• Task Management: Set automated reminders for yourself, colleagues, and clients. No more forgetting or missing out on critical tasks with the power of automation. With that, you can also track the records of each task and as a manager, you will be able to view your employees’ tasks and provide feedback.
• Document Management: Save all your documents in centralised cloud storage, where you are able to access all documents anytime from anywhere. With its capabilities, the platform also allows sharing or exchanging of documents with colleagues or clients, and it also supports documents in various formats such as PDF, MS Excel, MS Word, and image formats (jpeg, PNG).
• AI Debt Collector: Be able to remind clients for payment without having to keep calling them. GoKudos payment reminder and collection will remove this tedious task which allows you to focus on high-priority matters. The ability to choose an automated reminder through WhatsApp or SMS messages. And online payment is made easier with their dedicated payment gateway partner.

Apart from that, GoKudos is also working to enhance the platform by introducing the ‘digital signing’ capability under the document management feature; and also a payment gateway capability, allowing customers to pay on the spot instantly.

As to why they decided to highly focus on the three specific areas of task management, document management, and AI debt collector, Dato’ Vimmy explained that these can optimise business operational procedures in the organisation. This was determined by going to the heart of the problems faced by today’s businesses and finding out the repetitive, routine or administrative tasks that take up most of their time, create obstacles and affect productivity.

Prior to the product development, 6Biz Group did three rounds of surveys and met up with business owners and partners to check how much time they spent on administrative tasks like task management, document management and payment collection. Surprisingly, 6Biz calculated that companies spent 30% of their time on those tasks on average.

According to Dato’ Vimmy, 30% is quite high and something had to be done. So in 2019, the company set out to build something that businesses needed – leading to the creation of GoKudos.

Building a Platform to Solve Real-World Business Problems

As we covered during the launch of the platform (which you can read here), what gives GoKudos an advantage is that it is founded and managed by non-IT professionals, which enables them to use their own prior user experience to create a solution that fits everyone and not just IT professionals.

Early on, however, Dato’ Vimmy explained that the intention was to build the platform for accounting practitioners only. However, ever since 6Biz Group teamed up with MIMOS in early 2019, the plan was changed and they decided to scope out the platform to help a much wider audience.

She said, “It took us some time to think about it because when you say that you want to widen the scope, you have to think about the product design as well. So in order for us to serve both practitioners and other SMEs or businesses, we have to do a bit of adjustment so that we can cater for everyone.”

At the moment, 6Biz Group does not have a particular industry that they are targeting. The platform is catered to those with operational procedures or processes that would benefit from it – be it profit-making or non-profit making organisations, universities or freelancers.

Nevertheless, 6Biz is looking to make innovative enhancements to the platform in the future – for instance in the form of a time management system, which Dato’ Vimmy mentioned is set to be released in Q4 of 2021.

The time management system will complement and feature alongside the three available capabilities that the platform offers. Dato’ Vimmy believes this module will be the most important because it enables product selling companies, for example, to monitor whether they are under-or over-staffed.

She added that another thing that separates GoKudos from other platforms is they don’t charge based on the number of users. The reason is that they wanted to help businesses to recover during the pandemic faster. Apart from that, they aim to help businesses save 15% of the 30% time spent on administrative tasks.

“It is just a coincidence that we built this platform that is really able to help businesses when they work remotely when they are working from home. This is not something that was planned,” said Dato’ Vimmy. “It is just a coincidence that we are doing something that is ready to kick off during the pandemic.”

For Dato’ Vimmy, this is a tool that businesses can use for collaboration. Since collaboration is key for organisations to operate their businesses, this is not a tool that is meant for pandemic purposes only, but it’s useful for the new normal of working as well.

6Biz is planning to introduce the tool outside of Malaysia to other regions and they have started to lay out the foundations. The priority is to help Malaysia’s economy recover but the company would also like to expand and further help other businesses outside of the region.

(0)(0)