Easy Buy transforming its IT system to improve productivity
Easy Buy is morphing into a software-defined enterprise where the organisation mainly runs its information-technology infrastructure by software through virtualisation and cloud-computing technologies.
The aim is to become the top non-bank lender in the country.
The company this year spent Bt500 million on IT to facilitate the development and launch of new services and indirectly accelerate growth, which averages 6-8 per cent per year.
Chatchai Lertbuntanawong, director and executive officer, said yesterday that the company spent 10 per cent of sales revenue on IT to improve productivity.
Recently, the company invested in virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), which is the practice of hosting a desktop operating system within a virtual machine running on a centralised server.
The company has already turned 1,900 of its 2,500 desktop personal computers into “smart zero clients”. The rest will be rolled out by next year.
VDI helps the company speed up the delivery of services to customers, which increases customer satisfaction. It now takes only 30 minutes for loan approvals.
It also helps the company save up to Bt3.6 million per year in operating costs by using electricity from the local area network.
It is also implementing the VMware vCloud Enterprise Suite, an integrated offering for building and managing a VMware vSphere private cloud based on software-defined data-centre architecture.
The move is aimed at transforming its IT system so employees can automatically activate IT services on their own.
By next year, it plans to implement network virtualisation, the VMware NSX virtualised network platform and mobile device management for smartphones, tablets and notebooks to improve business agility and flexibility in support of a bring-your-own-device environment.
“This system will allow our staff to use their personal smartphones and devices to access work applications anywhere and any time,” he said.
IT is one of the important drivers of growth and expansion, Chatchai said. It plays a role as a facilitator and enabler, helping other departments to move forward and improve productivity.
“Our two main products, personal loans and instalment loans, are offered to 1.4 million customers through our 100 shops nationwide and the 45,000 ATMs of our six [partner] banks under the 30-minute approval process.
“We can do this because we focus on investing in IT every year,” he said.
Normally, the company recruits 400,000-500,000 new customers per year. It has about Bt35 billion in assets and 1.4 million customers.
