Mr Lim Ee Tuo: Pre-school should be high tech as well as high touch – personal, but also leveraging on technology.

Software as a service (SaaS) is a boon for small and medium enterprises (SMEs), but for all its cost effectiveness, traditional SaaS has not been tailored for sectors such as real estate and early childhood education. Standard SaaS offerings such as customer relationship management applications aren’t a good fit with childcare centres, or enterprise resource planning systems with real estate agents.

However, to ensure that SMEs in such sectors can reap the benefits of SaaS, IDA launched a SaaS Call for Collaboration (CFC) on 19 June 2012. The aim of the S$21 million programme was to spur the demand for high-impact SaaS solutions that will address homogenous business requirements of multiple sectors.

On 4 April 2013, Minister for Communications and Information, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim, announced that 13 proposals targeting six sectors have been awarded under the first wave of the CFC evaluations. At the end of all evaluations, the CFC is expected to support in excess of 600 companies. SMEs that will benefit come from industries such as early childhood, real estate, F&B, travel and private education.

Speaking at the Ministry of Communications and Information Workplan Seminar at the Gardens by the Bay, Dr Yaacob anticipated that the sector-specific SaaS solutions would help SMEs see “significant increase in productivity through the reduction of man-hours required and more streamlined business processes”.

To do this, focus groups were set up with industry bodies and the targeted end-users in different sectors. The CFC criteria were established based on their feedback.

In the area of real estate, for example, every estate agency has a key executive officer (KEO) who ensures that the processes and documentation behind each sale are in order. “They usually just work on Word and Excel, but when you reach 10 sales personnel, it gets harder,” said Mr Sunny Lee, CEO of Singapore Accredited Estate Agencies Ltd (SAEA), of how SMEs in the sector currently work.

For example, an agreement that governs the relationship between an agent and his client may come in 8 variations as it gets updated. Different templates of the form may be stored in different hard drives, resulting in confusion. Under the CFC, three vendors will provide a Real Estate Agency Management Platform, which allows the KEO to ensure that everyone accesses only the most up-to-date documents. The platform is expected to save subscribers more than 20 per cent in administrative and processing time.

While many of the young children in pre-school cannot read or write, early childhood education centres generate a lot of paperwork. To begin with, attendance must be taken daily, and collated monthly by principals – currently by hand. If a childcare centre has several branches, compilation takes a big bite out of a principal’s time. With the Health and Attendance Management System, the collating gets left to the computer, reducing the time taken for daily administration by up to 70 per cent.

Also available through the SaaS model are three School Management Systems. “Parents want to be updated as to what their children learn,” explained Mr Lim Ee Tuo, Deputy Director with the Early Childhood Development Agency (ECDA). “Technology can help teachers capture the children’s work. They can snap a picture, and upload it into an online portfolio. This also helps the teacher plan more purposefully for the individual child."

Under the CFC that encourages mass adoption, SMEs will be awarded grants to cover up to 70 per cent of initial setting up, training and subscription costs for up to two years. This is expected to spur the takeup by more than 80 real estate SMEs, and 200 SMEs operating pre-schools.

Mr Lim sees this as a boon in what is seen as a tech-wary sector. “Pre-school teachers are not usually familiar with technology, and we need to encourage them. The funding for training and costs will help, since they may feel there is no harm trying.”