After his retirement from the corporate world, Floyd Patrick Piedad decided to remain active in the technology sector as he felt that technology is in his DNA.
Leveraging his familiarity with technology start-ups, Piedad founded an Internet value added service company in 1996. Seven years later, he established an international software outsourcing company. This came naturally for him considering that in his 30-year career in the technology industry, he held different management and senior positions in multinational companies, where he established outsource teams for US-based start-ups.
Piedad is a non-believer in slowing down after retirement. Currently, he is managing a little-known Filipino software firm that has been pivotal in helping some local companies safely and successfully conduct their business in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In this endeavor, he joined forces with Calixto Chikiamco, CEO and founder of Kustom360, a successful entrepreneur who built one of the premier digital music production companies serving the Japanese market.
Piedad said that cloud-based software Kustom360, which has been operational for more than six years, allows businesses to easily schedule field assignments, get reports from field personnel in real time through their mobile device, and analyze the performance of their service or products in remote locations. These are all achieved while observing social distancing rules and eliminating physical contact with customers.
Field employees can submit reports through the Kustom360 mobile app that works even offline. Back office employees, managers and business owners can readily access the reports through the Web app, whether they are working from home or in the office.
“When I was invited to join the company last year at the height of the lockdowns and community quarantines, I immediately saw Kustom360’s potential in enabling companies to not only survive, but even thrive, in today’s very difficult business operating environment,” Piedad said in an e-mail interview with the BusinessMirror.
Now that he has taken the reins as the new president and COO of Kustom360, he has big plans for the company.
“The company not only gave me the opportunity to help our country’s struggling businesses, but also gave me the challenge to take a homegrown software product to the global market,” he said.
Although there are lots of companies offering digital solutions, Piedad said there are only few available solutions designed for SMEs that do not have the budget, skills, and time to implement complex and expensive software. He said Kustom360 can address the needs of SMEs, such as the immediate digitization of paper forms used when interacting with customers or getting data from the field.
Since Kustom360 is hosted in the cloud, no software needs to be developed, installed, and customized by the client. On day one, an existing paper form can be made digital, using a drag-and-drop intuitive user interface running on any web browser. This form can then be assigned to field personnel, who will be able to access it via their mobile device and submit them remotely without much effort.
He said Kustom360 has evolved over the last six years. The set of features and functions were developed hand-in-hand with their clients, and so the business benefits are tangible and impactful. To date, it has helped dozens of companies in different industries such as consumer goods, manufacturing, retail, franchise, micro-finance and property management.
“We have more than 2.5 terrabytes of client data managed by our software, from clients as far back as six and a half years ago who continue to be with us today. More than a hundred thousand reports are posted by field personnel monthly, representing over 1,300 different types of forms that have been customized by our clients,” Piedad explained.
Kustom360 includes features such as itineraries, location tagging, date and time stamps, calculated fields, media (photo, audio, video) and signature capture, audit trails, and other tools that allow businesses to effectively digitize field reporting. The software is available as a monthly subscription, based on the number of users. There are no up-front installation or development fees, nor any long-term contract commitments necessary.
For 2021, Kustom360 aims to break into the international markets. Born in the cloud, Piedad said Kustom360 will leverage the cloud to quickly scale its capacity and performance to meet the demands of clients.
To achieve this, Piedad said they will be seeking strategic investors who can help them establish a foothold in the Asia-Pacific and European markets.
“There is a $2-billion market out there for field service management software in 2021, with expected annual growth at 12.6 percent. And that growth already takes into account the negative impact of the global pandemic,” he said.