Ho Di-Yan's company Hauz currently helps businesses streamline their employee management process and has plans to provide financial aid to blue-collar workers and underserved individuals
Switching careers from civil engineering to tech entrepreneur was a drastic change for Ho Di-Yan. After graduating from university, he worked in the construction industry in Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand; while there, he managed and tracked the hours that blue-collar workers would clock in at the site.
He found that the companies he worked for used traditional methods such as punch cards to track attendance, potentially losing money by overpaying workers for overtime hours they did not work. The manual recording process was a common problem shared by companies across the region.
So in 2019, Ho and his co-founder Shah Fariq Aizal Sha Ghazni started Hauz, a cloud-based workforce management solution that helps businesses streamline the worker management process. He shares more about his business in his own words.
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Managing a workforce is challenging and time-consuming. The problem is that the construction industry is slow to adopt new technologies and has relied on manual processes like punch cards to track worker attendance. It was a time-consuming process that took hundreds of hours as all these cards had to be moved physically to the headquarters to process the data at the end of every month.
Hauz always prioritised the operations side of the business. We don’t necessarily want to come in and replace legacy systems like HR2000 or MySQL but rather work alongside them. Our clock-in feature uses a QR code that we place at a workstation. So once a worker scans the QR code and takes a photo as evidence, the system captures and authenticates a worker who has clocked in for work.
Many companies that used legacy systems did not believe our solution was necessary. They claimed our solution to be too advanced and many did not know what a QR code was. However, during the pandemic, businesses were forced to take digitalisation seriously. It was a blessing in disguise for us as there was a sharp rise in new customers during that period.
We monetise through a B2B (business-to-business) model, where we charge companies based on the number of workers using it per month. Beyond this, we want to tap into the B2C (business-to-consumer) segment and aim to link our users with fintech (financial technology) solutions such as microloans, insurance or remittance.
See more honourees from Malaysia on the Gen.T List 2022.