Even companies delivering digital transformation solutions to others need some operational overhaul from time to time. CloudMile, which provides AI and cloud services across Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam, realised blind spots have to be eliminated if it wants to continue scaling growth. To this end, it has partnered with monday.com for work management, and later for customer relationship management (CRM).
Soo Keng Ho, Customer Success Director, Southeast Asia, CloudMile, spoke with Frontier Enterprise about their scalability challenges, and how they deployed monday.com to enhance their internal operations.
What technology constraints did you face while expanding into APAC?
We’re in the technology space, supporting customers with AI and data solutions. Internally, we also needed digital tools to support our own work management. We started about eight years ago in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Then, between 2019 and 2020, we expanded into Southeast Asia.
In the past few years, as the company matured and shifted from being purely a reseller to focusing more on professional services, the time and capacity of our engineers and human resources became increasingly valuable. Management began looking more closely at how we utilised their time, so we needed a system to help us track utilisation across the different countries where we operate — from Taiwan and Hong Kong to Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
As a regional organisation, we required a single platform to monitor how resources were being deployed in each market.
What made monday.com the right choice over other work management tools?
I lead the customer success team in Southeast Asia, so project management tools are important for us. We first came across monday.com as a way to manage timelines and resourcing from a project perspective. Over time, we began to explore its potential as an operational tool for tracking resource utilisation across the organisation.
While using the platform, I realised it offered more than just project management. It supported broader work management and some of the operational needs we were looking to address. That’s when I brought it to the attention of our headquarters.
A key factor in our decision was usability, particularly for non-technical departments like mine. Even though we’re a tech company, not everyone has an engineering background. What stood out was how easy it was to configure. I often said, “If someone like me can figure this out, then so can everyone else.” That level of accessibility became a motivator across the organisation.
Because we know our business processes best, it helped that the platform was flexible enough for us to customise on our own. We only needed minimal support from the monday.com team. That autonomy mattered; I didn’t want to rely on raising support tickets and waiting for responses. I liked that the platform gave us the ability to quickly address issues on our own.
What was the biggest hurdle in deploying monday.com, and how was it resolved?
When we first engaged monday.com, we assumed that, being a SaaS company, they would leave everything to us as the end customer. But they connected us with a deployment partner based in Singapore. The partner engaged us holistically, understood our problem statement, and took a consultative approach. More importantly, they were quick to respond whenever I had questions. I felt the partner ecosystem from monday.com was very good.
Deployment across all seven countries was relatively seamless. My main responsibility was to ensure that our CloudMile teams adopted the solution and that I could troubleshoot any issues that came up. And if I couldn’t resolve something, I knew monday.com and its partners were ready to support.
The main challenge wasn’t technical, it was internal change management. We needed to communicate clearly with users that a new platform was being introduced. I had expected more resistance, but surprisingly, it only took one or two training sessions to roll it out across the organisation and begin driving behavioural change. It quickly became second nature for the teams. I think that also speaks to the platform’s ease of use. If I had to move over 200 employees to a new system, I wouldn’t have expected it to go as smoothly as it did with monday.com.
What results did you see after implementing monday.com?
As we transitioned into a more professional services–driven organisation, the utilisation and optimisation of our engineering resources became increasingly important. We moved our work management and engineers’ timesheet reporting onto the monday.com platform.
One of our priorities was improving chargeability — making sure our engineers’ time was spent on billable work. With that data in place, we saw a 20–30% improvement in engineer productivity in the Singapore team.
From a management perspective, I now have a much clearer view across different departments. I can quickly see whether teams are spending 80–90% of their time on chargeable tasks. If not, I can step in. I’m also able to drill into the data to see what different projects we’re working on, and whether each is paid or not.
Everything is displayed on the monday.com dashboard. It’s no longer a question of what our engineers are actually doing — the data shows it. I can track exactly where time is being spent, down to the specific project.
That level of visibility must have been critical for productivity, right?
Correct. It gave us significantly better visibility. We went from having almost none to having full visibility.
Are there other internal workflows you plan to optimise?
There are quite a few workflows we’re continuing to optimise at CloudMile. Truthfully, we’re still in transition, evolving from a start-up into a more mature organisation where having the right processes in place has become increasingly important.
We started with monday.com for work management because of clear operational needs. Over time, we realised we also needed to improve how we manage our CRM, and that’s where the platform’s ease of use became valuable. From resource and delivery management to CRM, the tool has fit well into our internal ecosystem.
There are still more processes we plan to optimise, and several features within monday.com may support that effort. We implemented the CRM integration about two to three months ago, and so far, that rollout has gone smoothly.
