Acepac International is taking an organic and paced approach to growth. The company, which specialises in supplying packaging products and materials to the likes of global logistics giant DHL and local pioneer and leader in e-commerce logistics, SingPost, is now looking to expand its operations to value-added services such as international procurement and project management.
According to Acepac International’s Head of Operations K.S. Ho, growing organically also requires the company to stay relevant and adapt to the economy. The company has opted to go down this route by digitalising their manual business processes that had been in place since it started.
“Before joining The FinLab, we had already started using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software,” said K.S. “We want to use the OCR for our customers’ POs (purchase orders), as the software can capture information into our system, such as the PO number, name and address, and generate the invoice. This can make our documents more consistent and error-free.
The solution would also help us save on labour, because if a customer comes with a PO with 11 line items, you don’t have to have to manually key in the individual line items 11 times, especially as you need to check for accuracy,” K.S. said.
Joining The FinLab introduced Acepac to innovations they have not seen, such as Spotto, an Australia-based IoT start-up which has developed a ‘tag’ that can be placed on any object to give it an online identity and record. Acepac saw that the tags could enhance the Warehouse Management System (WMS) and help them better monitor and manage their inventories, so they started their pilot with Spotto during The FinLab’s programme.
“Unlike the software we’ve bought before, Spotto’s technology operates in the cloud and helps us view our inventory through a dashboard that can be accessed from mobile or laptop devices anywhere. This can help us to scale as we can process the goods and information real-time and with more efficiency,” K.S. said.
“We’ve been giving feedback to Spotto, which has helped them to develop and improve on their product-market fit. It’s a good collaboration process and we are looking forward to bringing the partnership to a higher level after the pilot,” he added.
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