INTENSIFYING competition and the call of overseas markets are forcing many family-run, small and medium-sized enterprises to change the way they have operated for decades and to look at more efficient ways of doing business through information technology systems such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Passed on from generation to generation, these businesses have built up good reputations and have found it difficult to shrug off their traditional ways.
Local coffee and tea supplier Tsit Wing Group (TWG) is one such example. Established in 1932, TWG supplies coffee and tea to several outlets in Hong Kong, including McDonald's, Cafe de Coral and the luxury Ritz-Carlton hotel.
But with prices of coffee beans and tea leaves fluctuating, and competition increasing, TWG chief executive Peter Wong, the third-generation business owner, realised the company needed to evolve.
Mr Wong had aspirations to turn his family's business into 'a world-class food and beverage services provider', but to do so the company needed to modernise its management model.
When Mr Wong was ready for a management makeover, implementing an ERP application became an inevitable step. Aiming to integrate different business applications and their related data into a single unified system, ERP was seen as a critical step to enable the company's transformation.
But while ERP is hardly a nascent technology, introducing it to a traditionally run Chinese business is a painful process.