Sense of Purpose

Thank you DSS for letting me participate in the 14th DuPont Sustainability awards ceremony last Thursday 25th Feb. Congratulation to all the all the winners and I learnt few thing from all the speakers and I hope I can put to use.

Based on the sessions moderated by Davide Vassallo and Mieke Jacobs as well as Srinivasan Ramabadran and other speakers, some of my takeaways are: Sense of Purpose, Leadership commitment/involvement, Systemic approaches and Company Culture are some of the key to success.

Though IRESC founders and team have many years of Risk Management Consulting experience, me and Haz360TM (www.haz360.cloud) product development team are babies less than 3 years old. As a Product Manager, I would like to thank IRESC founders and colleagues for nurturing us to where we are now. My email contains - “Begin with an End Mind” as a slogan and I am glad to share my (our) sense of purpose for Haz360 business (There are my own personal views and most are supported by our team):

1. Build a scalable Secure SaaS platform to solve customer pain points

With key focus being

Collaboration

Traceability/accountability

Flexibility (to add business processes/worksheets on the fly)

And Security

It had been my dream to build a solution truly work like Utilities (electricity or gas) when I started my first entrepreneurial journey with COSMIC in 1991 – I had my slogan “Have it you own way” printed on my letterhead – later I learnt that Burger King had that advertisement in 1970s but scrapped.

Utility companies produce Electricity or Gas and distribute to consumers And the consumer harness the power of electricity to run different equipment - be it Fridge, Water heater, Air conditioner, Fan as per their own individual need.

However though many technologies and tools like SOA, No Code Low code and others are being launched in the market, many a times the Code and SQL databases were inseparable and there is a huge gap between what business users want and what technology teams can understand, deliver – platform “FOR THE USER BY THE USER”; we could not achieve that goal until recently.

I am glad our team now has built Haz360, a SaaS platform to help users to build their own databases on the fly intuitively without much training and store it wherever their IT team is comfortable in private cloud or public.

As with any product, it is a continuous process of iterative improvement. With Agile project management, DevOps and Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), I am confident we are on the right track.

2.  Grow paying user base from 0 to 25,000 within next 3 to 5 years

Any business using Excel can benefit from our platform. To start with we are focusing on the Process Safety related Business Processes in Oil and Gas, Chemical, Fertilizer, Construction, Railway, Manufacturing and others

As baby step we have just embarked on this digital marketing journey and seeking your help and support to grow healthily.

The market is huge that there is room for everyone. Our philosophy based on Blue Ocean strategy is to make competition irrelevant by differentiating ourselves with unique innovative application of technologies.

Many a times some SME Customers have dilemma whether to go for a solution like ours or just use Excel or Google Docs. I am sure you can find many articles in the internet on the Pros and Cons of using Excel or Google Docs, we respect Customers who choose to use Excel, Google Docs. But we truly believe what we are offering with Haz360 has a much better price performance and help clients in the long run.

        Collaborate better (multiple sites, multiple projects, anytime anywhere just with browser enabling multiple teams to work together concurrently)

·        Track changes made with Audit logs (Down to each cell, record level control, project level security)

·        Have a Single Source of Knowledge (Unlike multiple versions of same data kept by many users in different filenames)

·        Analyze the data across multiple Sites, Projects, Units, Subunits, Nodes (As many hierarchy as required whether you follow IBM Maximo Asset classification or others)

·        Paving way for Equipment Asset Database, Instrument Database, Scenario Database and many more innovations to enable AI/ML integration and other Productivity enhancements

3.  Attract Cultually Fit Team members

Work with culturally fitting Colleagues, Partners and Investors to grow exponentially and profitably. This is the most challenging part - building the TEAM and nurturing the CULTURE. With established internal systems, procedures, controls, we are all set to grow. Off course we need to balance well the Product development and Revenue generation effort to make this sustainable. As a bootstrapped Startup we are progressing well. I am 57 but I feel like I am 27 with the same enthusiasm when I launched COSMIC.

Below are my own personal goal close to my heart and have been working on for few years albeit with very slow progress and some are supported by our team

4. Invest in Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives

4.1  Upskilling People With Disabilities (PWDs)

Train Physically Disabled in Information Technology related jobs and Create employment opportunities. Inspite of so many advancement in technologies, it is sad to notice that most countries PWDs are not fully integrated. The issue starts from education. Most of PWDs don’t get pass Secondary. Based on HK % of disable with Tertiary-Degree is 2.5% (total population 9%)

https://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/asia/resource/z00ap/vol5no1/population.html

There is not much data on what type of employments PWDs hold however recent Legco discussion shows Unemployment rate of PWDs is 13.6% (in reality this could be much higher as high as 38%)

https://www.info.gov.hk/gia/general/201910/30/P2019103000213.htm

This below reports on India, also highlight extremely low retention rates for CWDs with only 23.1 percent of enrolled children currently attending schools.

https://www.orfonline.org/expert-speak/assessing-the-level-of-inclusive-education-at-the-school-level-in-india/

https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000368780

Personally I had been trying to recruit a disabled person with IT skills but I failed to get any resume (both from India and HK for operational and Tax reasons limiting only to these two regions for now - recently with India getting some traction but not much)

In fact many of the commercial office buildings do not even have Accessibility to support wheel chair and most do not even have toilets for special needs. Anyway it is irrelevant as our team can work@home. It is a vicious circle – with low level of education, less employment rate and there is less need for every building and businesses to support.  PWDs confidence level is also low and hence pushed in to poverty.

 I do hope we will have the resources and means to establish training dedicated to disabled.

4.2  Women empowerment

Employ more women in Sales & Marketing, Product Development, Project Management, Quality Assurance, Customer Service, Finance and others.

Thanks to my ex-boss Ronald Cheung at Lifewood Data for the opportunity practicing this between 2010 and 2015 and giving me support to speak in Johannesburg conference organized by Microsoft / Rockefeller foundation – how Lifewood trained high school girls from remote villages and empower them with Digital Technologies to reduce Digital Divide and a sense of purpose delivering results for Clients in China, Bangladesh and Africa (Benin) – this was much before India caught on Rural BPO or work@home in the last year due to COVID.

In fact, when Ronald and myself presented this to Top BPO organizations and Nasscom in 2009, No one believed in that. While travelling with Ronald in India, we realized how many bus loads of Employees were spending 4 hours (back and forth) in traffic stressed out where as we had the Concept of all Lifewood employees staying together in dormitory few minutes away from their Workspace – it gave them time to Study in Library, play at Basketball team or do gardening in their spare time or practice dance. Even I used to live with them for 5 days in a week only going home for weekends. Glad to see that Most countries businesses are moving to suburbs and creating better environment.

This gave me a lot of confidence about Remote work@home and which we implemented in IRESC long before COVID forced many companies to implement.

4.3  Improve quality of life of Patients paralyzed by stroke

Design and implement cost effective solution for daily activities

Most research organizations have been talking about Exoskeleton and other high tech solution in the last 5-10 years. Though millions of dollars have been poured into such ventures, there has not been any cost effective solution. With prohibitive costs like USD50,000 to 90,000 for exoskeleton it is not affordable for common people and economically viable. With help of few friends and Mentors and research we have more or less zeroed in on a design concept and working on the prototype (on a voluntary basis for now). Once proven getting it implemented requires careful planning.    

As per HK Census and Statistics department report, there are over 100,000 disabled assisted by family members for daily activities (and pushed further into poverty). With aged population increasing globally, we would like to support projects improving quality of life of the persons paralyzed by stroke and their carers. 

https://www.statistics.gov.hk/pub/B71501FB2015XXXXB0100.pdf

https://www.legco.gov.hk/research-publications/english/1516rb01-challenges-of-population-ageing-20151215-e.pdf

https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/89/11/11-089730/en

KPI                                               2020      2021      2022      2023      2024

4.1 PWD Employment                        0           -             -           -            -

4.2 Women Empowerment                 1           -             -           -            -

4.3 Stroke Patient Support                   0           -             -           -            -

Thank you and looking forward your wishes and support to make these reality and looking forward to updating KPIs regularly on the progress.

End of document