Helutrans ups Chatter at work

It's the business equivalent of social networking – only more secure and more reliable.

That’s what Helutrans Group, a leading arts logistics consulting and project management firm, has discovered over the last few months. Helutrans specializes in the area of fine arts storage and the supply-chain of protecting, shipping and presenting works of art.

“People are very excited about the social networking model and now companies are too. The only problem is that Facebook and Twitter are social utilities that connect people, and not suitable for enterprise collaboration,” says Dick Chia, CEO, Helutrans Group.

With this in mind, enterprise cloud computing company, Salesforce, launched the industry’s first real-time enterprise social collaboration application and platform – Salesforce Chatter. Chatter has powerful integration facilities, automation tools, process management facilities, and most importantly it leverages a secure platform with a trusted sharing model to enable continuous collaboration within the enterprise.

“Social tools like Facebook and Twitter have redefined the values of consumer computing and helped ignite the social phenomenon. The compelling aspect of feeds, profiles, and groups, amplify the service’s stickiness,” says Jeremy Cooper, Salesforce Asia Pacific Vice President for Marketing.

Chatter provides expansive business collaboration in a “private, secure and trusted environment,” Cooper says. All Salesforce customers in Singapore now have Chatter. In addition, Chatter-only user licenses are also available for at US$15 per user per month, for customers using Professional Edition, Enterprise Edition or Unlimited Edition.

As proof to its promise of giving edge to any business, some 90 percent of respondents in a Chatter survey said they would recommend the enterprise collaboration platform to others. Customers reported a 27 percent increase in collaboration and a 22 percent improvement in productivity with Chatter. As one of Salesforce’s beta customers in Singapore, Helutrans started using Chatter very early on.

“Chatter has changed the way we work by providing us with an insight-based environment. It enables our employees to stay on top of company activities by subscribing to different streams of information such as changes in people, documents, opportunities, accounts, and cases,” explains Chia. “The implementation of Chatter has increased user-to-user communication within our organisation and it’s more organised than working through emails. Personally, I now communicate mostly via Chatter, leaving emails only for official memos and correspondences with people outside our organization.”