Saha Group to start B-to-employee project

The Saha Group is preparing a three-month business-to-employee (B2E) electronic commerce pilot project that will educate its employees on the new practice of e-commerce as well as to help it gain experience in on-line order taking and fulfillment.

Bangkok, July 12 (Bangkok Post) - As a giant manufacturer of consumer products with some 300 subsidiaries and 70,000 employees, the Saha Group will implement B2E to address the business-to-consumer mass market and business-to-business marketplace.

The service will be introduced in the middle of this month and the e-commerce system is being implemented by Datamat, a systems integrator that will also handle the Application Service Provision (ASP) for the Saha Group.

Datamat vice president Visit Sukphol noted that the Saha Group also aimed to use the B2E platform to provide welfare for its staff.

This project would also be an approach to adjust employees' behaviour and to familiarise them with the principles of e-commerce, he said. With the B2E service, employees of the Saha Group would be able to order goods, mostly consumer products, through the web site at any time. Product delivery would be made within 24 hours by Tiger, which was also a subsidiary of the Saha Group, with a service charge of 20 baht per order, no matter how many products were delivered, he said.

Payment would be made by deducting the bill for goods ordered from employees' salaries. However, credit would be limited to one of four levels: 1,000 baht, 2,000 baht, 3,000 baht and 5,000 baht, depending on the staff member's salary. Mr Visit added that with a broad base in terms of the number of staff, its own consumer products and its own logistics, this pilot project would enable the Saha Group to have a clearer direction on e-commerce.

Saha Group Chairman Bunyasit Chokwattana had taken one year to educate the group's staff and its executives on the new practice of commerce since e-commerce was a "must" for trading, he said.

Based on its employee base of some 70,000 people, Mr Visit noted that it would not be difficult to later expand the service to the mass market.

"The Saha Group aimed to strengthen its internal system by first initiating the business-to-employee programme and then the company would introduce business-to-consumer and business-to-business e-commerce," he said.

In the near future, the Saha Group would also launch Sahajob, an internal job recruitment site, facilitating the staff to apply for jobs on its web site. There are leased lines connecting the subsidiaries of the group while it was going to migrate its internal systems from the mainframe-based to an IP platform.

B2B? That's, like, so "last month"!