Thursday, July 26, 2012

Walk Your Brand




The concept of brand is not as highly sophisticated or far-fetched as what many brand consultants and branding agencies have been trying to make business community believe. They ought to rake the dough while many are still in the blur of the subject matter.

Personally, I don’t think there is a specific formula for a company to follow in order to produce a successful brand in a specific time period. Of course you could set aside an awesome budget and plan for over the top branding activities to highlight your brand but don’t confuse advertisement and marketing activities as brand, it’s part of building a brand but it is not the brand itself.

How do you feel when you see Apple products? What words come to mind when you see Dell? What feeling do you relate when Coca Cola is mentioned? How about Honda? It’s all about feelings; it’s all about human emotions. That is what branding is, in my humble opinion.

For me, Apple products are stylish and reliable. Dell is cheap if you know DIY but lacks user-friendliness. Coca Cola is fun and full of memories, Honda is dependable. 

Brand is totally about consumer perception. No matter how much brand awareness activities are being carried out to make your customers believe what you want them to believe about your brand, when you don’t deliver your brand’s promise, negative perceptions start to form in your consumers’ minds. And if this perception is not corrected instantly but further strengthened by constantly failing to deliver the promise, the brand is still forming – just that it’s not to your preference.

Every brand has its personality and personality is best described with human terms. When you deliver what you want people to believe about your brand, then you are on your way to having a promising brand.

FingerTec’s brand essence has always been about making things easy for our clients. And trust me that on our side, the tasks have never been easy. Nonetheless, we take the pleasure knowing that FingerTec is easily implemented and support is available everywhere to help our clients the world over. Occasionally, there are some glitches we need to rectify and the respectful teams are always dedicated to deliver. At FingerTec, the objective of delivering “ease of use” has been communicated throughout the company and everybody is aware of what we have to do.

Taking things a step forward, soon FingerTec will be making things easier with the T-box package for TimeTec Web.  The T-box will simplify implementation of TimeTec Web where we have pre-configured everything for you to ease your work. We’ll offer packages that make system deployment easy and hassle-free. One package solves it all.

Say what you want about a brand, pepper it with great slogans but at the end of the day if you failed to deliver the talk, you fail. Walk your brand.  

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Taking Attendance to The Cloud



I have a BSc degree in Psychology but never once in my life have I had someone lie on a couch, paying me to listen to their problems. That would be nice while I'm having pistachios and a cup of coffee on the side and money pouring in the bank, wouldn’t it? Kidding! The truth is, I've been working in time and attendance technology for more than 12 years now, right from the time fingerprint technology was still a novelty. But the focus has always been on the fingerprint or biometrics technology, and it was transparent in the way we strategically positioned and marketed our products worldwide. Over the years however, not only did the technology improve in leaps and bounds, the time attendance technology also has evolved to become a vital tool to measure workforce’s efficiency against costs spent.

The importance of the time attendance software is apparent and it has taken over the focus from the hardware itself. TCMS V2 is deemed as one of the powerful time management softwares in the industry and from merely being a complimentary software with a few basic features, it has gained such popularity and importance that we are now bringing it to another level, up in the cloud.

Attendance on cloud via TimeTec Cloud gathers all workforce data in a remote server to be accessed by relevant people through the Internet. Subscribe to the service to get ahold of the transaction data and the reports at any time. This concept is not new yet it’s not widely available in various industries. We want to offer it for office automation. TimeTec Cloud lets you take charge of your employees via TimeTec Mobile and Web Check-ins even when they are assigned with assignment outstations. Casually keeping track of your staff, so to speak. 

Why attendance via cloud? Because at the end of the day, you are not concerned about the hardware that you installed in your premises, it’s the quality of the time spent by your staff in completing the company’s plans and goals is your priority. And TimeTec Cloud gets you to manage your team of employees better at minimal costs, less maintenance hassle and through a user-friendlier system.

I’d love to have someone on my couch paying me to listen his problems but it’s also a fact that he would have to pay me extra if he takes 10 more minutes of my valuable time. Time equals cost/money and if you could better use the time of your employees, I’m pretty sure you’d like to subscribe to the latest TimeTec Cloud we offer. It's be up and running pretty soon but first, you could learn more about it more in www.timeteccloud.com and for those who want therapy, you know where to find me. 

Again, put down that phone, I’m kidding!

by Norana Johar, COO, FingerTec HQ