Headquartered in Hong Kong, Cemcoa is the international trading arm of Shun Shing Group, which specializes in cement, cementitious materials and solid fuels trading and transportation for their customers in the industrial, construction and power generation industries. For several years, Cemcoa was using Hosted Exchange for their email communications. Over time, the company decided that it was necessary to transit all 150 users , located across 10 different locations, to the cloud. One of the major reasons for this change was to gain the ability to collaborate and standardize communications on one Microsoft 365 platform using Teams and SharePoint.

 

“ We saw productivity increase only after MS Teams and SharePoint Online adopted across all departments. ”

Anika Ali Chowdhury
Corporate Projects Manager

 

Digital Transformation Journey

Anika, Corporate Projects Manager at Cemcoa, shared her excitement and her vision for Cemcoa’s digital transformation, and how their efforts paid off with their recent award win. “Cemcoa was presented with the Microsoft Super Cloud Adoption Award in 2020.  This recognition is testament to Cemcoa’s success in our digital transformation journey.  Our high adoption rate on SharePoint Online and Teams has driven big wins for our productivity.  The platform is very user-friendly and has penetrated across all levels, from sales to the account and management teams.  Productivity became evident after the adoption of SharePoint Online, with its execution done in an orderly fashion.  We started using SharePoint by setting up our Company intranet for all departments well before the pandemic outbreak, allowing users access to company documents anytime and anywhere without the hassle of managing an in-house document server. We were finally able to decommission that server after 12 years of use! The next natural evolution was to automate and digitalize our workflow using Microsoft flows, forms and PowerApps.”

 

Why Adoption Matter

The business landscape is changing.  Employees seek purpose and satisfaction, whilst employers aim to harness worker ingenuity.  A diverse, multi-generational workforce can now work anytime, anywhere.  Success depends on an enterprise’s ability to collaborate and drive productivity within teams spread across the globe.  Although Superhub works hand-in-hand with Microsoft, the average M365 adoption in various Hong Kong business sectors is still low, as shown in the chart below.  The key consideration that set up Cemcoa as a Microsoft Super Cloud Adoption Award recipient was their high adoption rate of Teams and SharePoint Online, reaching up to 97%.  

 

Adoption of Microsoft 365 Productivity Tools for Selected Installed Base in HK Market

 

Successful Tips to Navigate Adoption

Anika was in charge of the digital transformation project within Cemcoa.  She shares her advice for success: “From my experience, appointing a single point of contact for digital projects is mission critical. Often, the growing pains is hard to justify by the different departments who are just use to the way things are. The person responsible has to be given authority to look into different business processes, and have the ability to  re-prioritization daily work in order to meet digitalization goals.  

 

The adoption journey of Cemcoa is similar to the best practices recommended by Microsoft Adotpion Guide:

1.       Defining a vision.

Companies were most successful when they had a clearly defined vision and knew how new technology would be used.

2.       Getting leadership support.

Successful projects had proactive support from senior leadership to encourage new technology use.

3.       Training end-users.

Organizations used multiple training formats to engage with employees across business units.

4.       Raising awareness.

Top performers used email, employee portals, posters, teaser videos and newsletters.

 

Why Superhub

Cemcoa’s decision to go with Superhub for our digital transformation was largely due to their position as Microsoft’s Top Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) for a few years running.  They were one of the very few Microsoft partners that are experts in all three Microsoft cloud technologies, including Modern Workplace, Azure cloud platform and Business Solution with in-house PowerApps developers.  We were impressed by their cloud expertise and best practices on M365 tenant set-up, migration and post-sales support.  We see Superhub as a long-term cloud partner to Cemcoa’s digital transformation journey.