Shopl & Company Presents Shopl, an On-Site Work Collaboration Tool, and HADA, an On-Site Facility Inspection Software.

SEOUL, REPUBLIC OF KOREA (SOUTH), December 3, 2023 /EINPresswire.com/ -- 
Image Courtesy - Shopl & Company

Shopl & Company, Inc. (CEO Jun Lee), which was selected for the business sector for the “2023 Activation of Digital Services in Public Convenience Sectors” run by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), is a Korean B2B SaaS startup whose goal is to digitalize on-site tasks. The company helps field-based clients (such as store-based manufacturers, distributors, franchises, and public institutions) who are less digitally proficient and lack the resources to form individual development teams in-house and digitalize their on-site operations. The company is known for its continued growth on a global basis, having launched its business globally (Latin America) from the beginning, with 60% of company revenue coming from overseas as of the end of 2022.

In 2018, Shopl and Company launched Shopl. Shopl is a B2B SaaS-based on-site workforce collaboration tool that helps manage clocking-in/out and tasks between headquarters and on-site employees. Since the launch, additional demand from existing customers for digitalizing on-site facility inspections has continued. To address this demand, the company launched HADA, an on-site facility inspection software, in 2022, which became a paid service in 2023. HADA is a solution that digitalizes clients’ inspection work by conducting multiple paper-based facility inspections. According to a company representative, the service has continued to grow, with more than 2.8 million inspections accumulated since its launch.

Shopl, a task management software for on-site workers, sets itself apart from other software in that it combines clocking-in/out (scheduling) and task management into one, as the company saw it was necessary considering the top-down work style and the nature of on-site work where tasks are assigned according to a daily schedule. Shopl & Company also saw that on-site work involved many repetitive tasks, which could be handled effectively using AI programs. Based on this, the company introduced AI-based functions from the very beginning to reduce the time and energy spent on repetitive tasks.

It provides various functions for on-site work management, such as bulletin boards, reports, and chats based on clock in/out times and scheduling. Considering the different work characteristics of each company, the software can be customized so that each company can select the features they need and set the details of those features themselves, tailoring the software as if it were developed in-house. In other words, the software has made it easy for companies that need to be digitally savvy or have the resources to develop in-house software to customize the features they need with just a few clicks in Shopl.

While Shopl is an on-site worker collaboration tool, HADA is an on-site facility inspection solution. Most facility inspections by private and public organizations in Korea and overseas still involve paper checklists attached to the facility and filled out at each inspection. Paper checklists can be intuitive, but inspection results cannot be accessed offline because data aren’t digitalized. Also, paper checklists make it challenging to verify the identity of the actual inspector or the inspection time.

Shopl & Company emphasized that their solution can be used easily by scanning a QR code without signing up or downloading an app, making the process seamless for facility inspectors, most of whom are in their 50s and 60s. This means that not only inspectors of public institutions who manage large areas but also the general public can transparently access the inspection information and use facilities with assurance, even during pandemics.

According to a representative from Shopl & Company, “more than 60% of the workforce in Korea and 85% globally work on-site, such as stores, rather than in offices, but due to the nature of on-site work, their tasks are relatively undigitized because they lack awareness of the need to digitalize or do not know how to approach or implement digitalization. Much software for workplace digital transformation has emerged since 2010. However, most of it is still centered around people who work from an office, with a limited number of applications considering on-site workers’ characteristics.”

“Most traditional on-site work relies on paper or messaging to collect data, which is then entered into Excel and managed. Large enterprises develop their software in some cases, but even in those cases, maintaining this in-house software becomes difficult due to the lack of continuous upgrades and the rising labor costs of development personnel globally. There is a cost-benefit component associated with in-house software or Excel. However, since it does not require monthly expenses and employees of the company are already familiar with the existing methods. We believe that the biggest barrier to implementing a SaaS-based solution for digitalizing on-site tasks is the ‘familiar discomfort’ of conventional methods, and we’ve been working hard to address this,” he pointed out.

Before the commercialization of the HADA service (before 2023), Shopl & Company operated through revenue from the Shopl service. The company grew more than 150% year-over-year thanks to the revenue generated by the Shopl service and has made 19 new hires in 2022 alone. According to the company representative, clients who adopted the service often witness a lock-in effect, where the entire spectrum of their work is done on Shopl, with leaders using the app more than 25 times a day and employees more than 15 times a day. As a result of this high utilization, the company has a 0% paid customer churn rate, even five years after launch.

“Like private companies, public institutions have seen a growing demand for digitalizing on-site work. In particular, during the urea water crisis in 2021, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety conducted a project to collect urea water data through HADA at gas stations nationwide, and expectations are rising for its possible use in public institutions,” explained the representative.

“Most of the existing software for on-site workers is focused on developed markets like the U.S. and Europe, and the language offerings are often limited to English and European languages. We started in Latin America and still do most of our business in Latin America and Southeast Asia. We differentiate ourselves regionally by offering ten languages in those countries, including Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Spanish,” he added.

The National IT Industry Promotion Agency (Director Heo Seong-wook, hereafter ‘NIPA’) is promoting the “2023 Activation of Digital Services in Public Convenience Sectors” to encourage the spread of contact-free services in areas close to people’s lives, such as business, household consumption, education/evaluation, and wellness/health in response to the endemic era. Starting in 2021, this project has selected and supported vital investment areas requiring an urgent digital transition due to the accelerated shift to a digital-focused economy and society in the post-COVID-19 era. Shopl & Company was selected for the business sector of NIPA’s program.

Davis Kim
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