StaffAny - StartupX

Written by on June 1, 2020

Discovering a global pain point across the F&B industry

StaffAny’s founder Janson Seah used to manage a bar, and quickly found out that manpower issues were a common challenge across the F&B industry. The mobility of flexible workers who were paid by the hour meant that scheduling them in for shifts and managing their performance could be a nightmare for most F&B owners.

That experience spurred him and his team to create better solutions for the industry, and to use technology to improve working environments and dynamics between workers and managers.

Using technology to enable manpower-heavy businesses

StaffAny’s solution is an integrated platform that combines HR and operations. The platform allows for integrated scheduling and automated timesheets, reducing the need for manual work, and allowing store owners and managers more flexibility and time to focus on the business. That’s a boon for manpower-heavy businesses, whose stakeholders can often be stuck in handling manual administrative tasks day to day.

Despite their ambition, their initial product did not get much traction, and it was only after the team doubled-down on efforts to talk to users, conducting over 100 door-to-door interviews, were they able to make considerable improvements to their product and build a platform that was well-received by their customers.

Nonetheless, the team acknowledges that operations management for businesses is largely unsolved and high in complexity, and as they begin to grow closer to their users, and continue to improve on their product, the team acknowledges that they are not even 1% near to what they have set out to accomplish.

Supporting a heavily impacted industry across the globe

To date, StaffAny counts renowned F&B brands like LiHO, Ippudo Ramen and Dimbulah Coffee amongst its core clientele in Singapore. Globally, Juan Valdez Coffee in Kuala Lumpur and Mare Nostrum in Jakarta are also adopters of StaffAny. Most recently, the team has also expanded into other verticals beyond F&B, with retail clients such as Pandora, GOGOVAN in the logistics space, and Gold Prosperous in the home services industry, and are excited to serve the needs of hourly workers beyond the F&B sector.

As COVID-19 struck the F&B industry across the globe, StaffAny saw how their clients struggled to adapt as their day-to-day operations were affected. The team quickly mobilised resources to engage their clients and identified ways that they could use their platform to support the F&B industry. The pain points they identified allowed them to develop new features that proved valuable for their clients – in June 2020, they launched CICO (Clock-In, Clock-Out) for small and medium enterprises, further extending free use of the tool globally to support businesses worldwide. Integrated with SafeEntry, the mobile tool allows SMEs to be compliant with staff management measures implemented for businesses during this pandemic.

Team

Janson Seah, Lee Kai Yi, Jeremy Hon, Eugene Ng, Chow Jia Yi