Softinn Solutions Sdn. Bhd. Business & Entrepreneurship

Table of Contents

Introduction        2

Entrepreneur Profile        3

Organization Profile        4

Case Study Analysis        5

➢        Strengths        6

➢        Weaknesses        7

➢        Opportunities        7

➢        Threats        8

➢        Business strategies and Future plans        9

Summary        10

References        11

Appendices        12

Figure 1.2: Softinn Solution Website        12

Figure 1.3: Interview with Softinn Founder        12

Introduction

Internet is a global network connecting around the world. There are more than 200 countries are linked together by the internet to communicate, exchange, and share news. The Internet brings a lot of benefits to human as it is available all the time for the users as long as there is network connection on the devices. As we know Internet has provided wide range of information resources and services such as electronic commerce which is as known as e-commerce, a part of business. In recently years, more and more people are using e-commerce as their transaction medium to purchase products or services from the Internet because of E-commerce helps reducing business cost and allowing consumers to make transactions regardless of time and distance. Through the interview session with the founder of Softinn Sdn. Bhd., Lee Jee Seng, we know that Softinn is a business that offer a mean to the small and medium sized hotels’ owners to start their e-commerce.

Entrepreneur Profile

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Lee Jee Shen, the founder of Softinn Solutions Sdn. Bhd. He graduated from Faculty of Engineering and Technology, Multimedia University in Malacca. After graduation, he has been working as an engineer before he started his own business. He actually does not plan to be an entrepreneur but it started when he was working on some side projects with his friends. As he seen, some opportunity when doing his project he started a business, which he becomes an entrepreneur until today. At the first, he started engineering business that built electronic design for factory and then he sold it to a Singapore company. He earned some profits from selling out his first company. Afterward he started his second business but unfortunately, he failed his business. Hence, he did researches and found that starting an engineering business is too costly due to those equipment so he changed his mind and started his third business, Softinn Solutions that is related to information technology field, which would cost lesser compared with engineering field due to the equipment required when starting the business.

Organization Profile

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Softinn Solutions Sdn. Bhd. is an emerging travel technology company that develops a cloud-based hotel reservation system for small and medium sized hotels (30 rooms or below). Headquartered in Malacca, Malaysia. Now they have expanded their business to other countries, which are Indonesia and Vietnam. Softinn also creates and manages LetsGoHoliday.my, a marketplace for hotels as well as portal for travelers to discover hotels that fit their needs. Different from the online travel agency, OTA like Agoda, Trivago and so forth, Softinn focuses more on helping the hotels improving themselves like providing free website, booking engine.

        In July of 2013, first hotel Sunflower Hotel Melaka has signup Softinn Cloud Reservation System to use it. In the same year of October, Softinn won their first award from Alliance Bank BizSmart SME Top 10 Finalist. Angel Investor SEVB invested RM 150,000 into Softinn in September 2014. Softinn also launched their mobile app which won a prize in Hong Kong. In June 2016, they become the winner for Echelon Asia TOP100 Startup Search. Currently there are more than 800 hotels are using Softinn reservation system.

Case Study Analysis

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• Strengths

As mentioned above, Softinn is a company that provide reservation management system for small and medium sized hotels. Unlike the typical online travel agencies, OTA such as Agoda, Booking.Com, Trivago etc. Softinn named behind the hotels as Softinn noticed the hotels need their own brands and websites to allow their customers to make direct booking with the hotels instead of using OTA to finish the booking.

The present of Softinn who provides free booking engine and secured .com domain helps hoteliers to start their ecommerce. With own people can more easily know official website, the hotel’s name and logo but most hotels do not own an IT department so Softinn is providing different design for each hotels’ website and collect full payment on behalf of the hoteliers. Softinn does not charge any licensing fee but only take 12% transaction fee on each successfully paid booking which is different with other competitors that charge on licensing fee no matter there is any sales made or both licensing fee and commission.

Softinn is one of the certified partner on TripAdvisor, which can help the hotels obtain more engagement with the visitors. The cloud calendar developed by Softinn also helps in preventing overbooked matter by import and synchronize more than 1 calendar from OTAs and Google. Furthermore, Softinn also provide logo design service, photo shooting service and email hosting service for their customers where currently there is no similar competitors provide such services as Softinn does.

• Weaknesses

The founder of Softinn claimed himself is not an experienced leader or entrepreneur, has been making mistakes along the way he came through. Softinn have not yet recognized as market leader in the industry now. He thinks that the progress of the company is not moving fast enough as expectation even though currently there are 800+ hotels using their system. In addition, hiring many young workers is good but also means the workers are lack of experience of facing hard time as going through hard time faster and moving on sooner are important. No predetermined plan to overcome the problems, just adopt measures that appropriate to the actual situation.

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