CityHub helps lean startups impress with Canon office solution

By SearchSMBAsia Editors | Jun 5, 2009

For businesses entering new markets, the tedious process of starting up an operation-ready office may steal precious time and money away from aggressively pursuing market opportunities. So, by offering office infrastructure as a utility, like electricity or water,  CityHub, a provider of fully equipped office space and services, hopes to minimize start-up cost and pain.

In CityHub's business model, entrepreneurs only pay for they want and use. They can scale up or down operations at will so if there is a dip in the market, customers can easily downsize. And when business booms, they can quickly expand to take advantage of the market growth.

But to offer such services at a reasonable and competitive price, CityHub needed to drive costs out of their infrastructure. The company need to optimize its infrastructure to deal with a variety of clients and yet provide the personalized service required by them.  

Going digital

One solution that CityHub deployed is a centralized server for digital archiving of important documents.  

Using Canon's secured digital scanning and archiving for highly confidential documents like contracts and quotations did away with the need for rows of storage cabinets. As a result, tenants did not have to pay for space, saving on cost as well as time and effort in seeking and purchasing office equipment such as fax machines or copiers.

Each CityHub tenant office is networked to a central, all-in-one printer, allowing tenants to print, scan, fax and archive their documents. The intelligent printer is usedto scan and archive their documents for secure storage.

Secure access

Only authorized tenants have access to their documents and folders via biometric fingerprint authentication.  Once a tenant is logged into the Canon eCopy system, an intelligent scanning solution specifies which digital folder their document will be scanned and archived to.  Folders specific to the company, are not accessible to other tenants or CityHub staff.

“I’m really impressed by the central scanning and biometric infrastructure," said Daniel Kennedy, business development director at Capital Market Solutions, a CityHub client. "We have  a lot of signed-off contracts and quotes here that I need to originally photocopy and send back to head office so it would be good to have them in a digital copy, without the hassle of having to file all the papers."

With biometric access enabled, CityHub can also act as a multi-location business resource center as customers can use IT facilities to print, archive or manage documents.  For example, the eCopy solution enables instant archiving so the clients have peace of mind knowing that important paperwork is archived in accordance with compliance regulations.

Making an impression

Recognizing that trust is an important factor in business and first impression counts, CityHub offers multifunction printers for their tenants to produce high-quality documents with clear, crisp text and images in professional business presentations.

Additionally, this has created a source of revenue for CityHub because the printers can distinguish between documents that contain colour and those that are in black and white.  This allows cost-per-page charges to be accurately reflected, as black-and-white prints cost much less than colored ones.   

Again, for CityHub's customers, this means that they pay only for what they use. They are also able to access their own usage information 24/7 in managing their cashflow.  This transparency also creates trust between CityHub and its customers.

For the lean organisations that make up CityHub’s clientele, Canon's solution facilitated a convenient ‘plug and play’ environment, allowing the tenants to get right down to business.

CityHub foundation

Founded in 1999, CityHub is a provider of fully-equipped office space and services for entrepreneurs, startups and MNCs entering the Asian market.  Each CityHub office is located in a premier business location, and fully staffed with administrators, secretaries and receptionists.  

CityHub operates in Singapore and Vietnam.  The company has three offices in Singapore at The Forum, Ngee Ann City and the Central Business District.  In December 2006, the company opened its first branch overseas in Ho Chi Minh City’s tallest building – Saigon Trade Centre. A year later, the company expanded to Hanoi.

Adopting a one-stop hub approach, CityHub allows busy entrepreneurs on-the-go to utilize any of the facilities in each of its three branches, such as designer boardrooms and lounges for meetings with clients.

"In my line of work, I have to travel from meeting to meeting with bulky presentation materials. So it helps that I can print it at the nearest CityHub branch, and at the same time, I can use their facilities to work better and be more efficient [even when I am] in Ho Chi Minh," said Daniel Lim, senior corporate commodity manager for SEA at Singapore-based Sparton Electronics, another CityHub client.

The CityHub logo combines the Chinese character ‘Cheng’, meaning city, with two essential factors for success in business, “earth”, and “completion”. It embodies the company’s business philosophy that even the tallest building must start with a firm foundation.

With this in mind, CityHub places a great deal of emphasis on the quality of its infrastructure and facilities, the versatility of its services, and the accessibility of its office locationsso that its clients can immediately focus on core activities like sales.