MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: Boonchoo Malhotra

MEMBER SPOTLIGHT : From Hiring to Retirement : How HONO’s Complete Solution is Transforming the Future of Workforce Management

In an increasingly competitive world, the strength of your workforce directly influences your business success. Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions offer organizations a comprehensive, integrated platform to manage every aspect of talent—from hiring and onboarding to development, performance, and retention. By combining advanced technology with actionable insights, organizations can streamline HR processes, enhance employee engagement, and foster a culture of continuous growth. HCM solutions are designed to scale with your business needs, helping you attract the right talent, optimize workforce performance, and drive long-term strategic goals.

In this month’s Member Spotlight, we’re excited to highlight Mr. Boonchoo Malhotra, HONO’s Country Director for Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, and explore how’s HONO end-to-end “hire to retire” solutions are transforming the way organizations manage their workforce.

Let’s start with the basics. Who is HONO and what is your role in the company?  

HONO is a leading global provider of Human Capital Management (HCM) solutions, to enterprises – with presence in 14 countries including India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, and the Middle East. Serving more than 1 million users and over 300 enterprises as its customers – HONO’s Cloud hosted HCM solutions include features for enterprises to manage their HR operations including employee record management, leaves, attendance, payroll, Performance management, Recruitment and much much more! Please visit us at www.hono.ai for more details.

HONO has been recognized by leading analysts such as Gartner. We are ranked #14 by customer rating globally on Gartner’s Peer-Reviews website (basis last 12 months reviews). We are also listed in Gartner’s report on ‘HCM Technology Strategies for Asia Pacific and Japan’ as a leading provider of HCM solutions.

I lead HONO’s business for Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines. I work very closely with our customers in our region to ensure their success in achieving their HR objectives, by leveraging HONO’s advanced solution and services, and also introduce HONO to leading companies in the region.

Can you tell us a little about the history of HONO? When was it founded, what sparked it, etc.? 

HONO was launched in 2016 by Mr.Mukul Jain – a leading entrepreneur and thought leader in the Human Resources and HCM space. HONO saw that leading organizations all over Asia are struggling to manage their HR operations, meet targets on HR efficiency, and maintain compliance to local regulations and policies. This is because their existing HR processes and systems are not enabled well by HR technology – which we find is often outdated, old, expensive, inefficient, rigid and poorly supported. This leads to wastage of time, and increased efforts and cost for the organization. 

We are determined to change this and we are on a continuous mission to be at the cutting edge of HR Technology, bringing in the latest technologies and advanced features (like Generative-AI) to enterprises and their employees all over the world. HONO has invested, and continues to invest heavily in building an industry leading HCM solution. 

HONO has been actively present in South East Asia for more than 4 years now. We have our regional headquarters in Singapore, with offices in Bangkok, Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur and Manila. In Thailand – we have seen excellent response, with companies like ThaiReinsurance, Mitsubishi Electric, Federal Electric Corporation and PSD infrastructure trusting HONO. We have also partnered with leading organizations like Ramssol Group Berhad, ASEAN Business Partners etc. to jointly bring in our expertise to Thailand and other South East Asia countries. 

Can you give an overview of HONO’s HCM solutions? What key features set your software apart from others in the market? 

HONO offers a full suite Human Capital Management (HCM) solution, covering every aspect of an employee’s journey in an organization, from hiring to retirement or exit. Our solution offers a set of modules including Employee Records, Recruitment, Onboarding, Leave and Attendance, Performance Management, Compensation Management, Payroll, Learning Management, Succession Planning, Helpdesk, Rewards and Recognition, Surveys, Employee Separation and Analytics. These modules work seamlessly together. All of our modules are built on the latest technology and are continuously updated with new features and capabilities. We have partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) as our hosting partner.

In addition, our HCM Solution – we also offer payroll services in over 20 countries- including Thailand, and countries across South East Asia, India and the Middle East.

Our Solutions and services are enabled for easy access through our own multilingual interactive intelligent chatbot. HONO trains the chatbot on your employee data and policies- allowing it to respond to employee queries and also complete more than 30 common HR transactions like leave applications, checking attendance of themselves and their teams, payroll and performance management related transactions etc. Our chatbot recognizes, reads and answers in 102 languages including Thai, English and other Asian languages. We have integrated our chatbot with MSTeams, LINE, WhatsApp, Viber etc, so that employees can easily interact with the chatbot using an app of their choice.

HONO is a superior solution compared to others in the market because-

1. HONO offers a complete suite of solutions covering all aspects from “hire to retire” – not just a few modules or solutions.
2. We are the only solution provider who offer both a full stack HCM solution and a compliant payroll solution across 20+ countries.
3. HONO is a pioneer in infusing AI driven features in its product -including predictive analytics, real time nudges and autonomous actions – far ahead of our competition in this regard.
4. Our multilingual chatbot enables easy access to information, and quick completion of transactions – in any language and through any app of choice- including MSTeams, LINE, WhatsApp and Viber.
5. Our entire solution is fully built and maintained completely by HONO -ensuring that our customers always have access to the latest features and versions.
6. Implementation, Deployment, and support is by HONO experts – assuring best in class support both locally in-country, as well as through our Regional and Global support centers. 

What types of organization benefit most from using your HCM software? (e.g. industry types, company sizes, etc.) 

Our solution is designed to be industry and organization size agnostic. We have built a highly adaptive and configurable solution which can be easily deployed for a variety of customers across industry types and sizes across countries. We serve companies across industries (Manufacturing, Hospitality, Financial services, Retail, Infrastructure, Services, Healthcare, IT etc.) We are the chosen choice of conglomerates including the Mitsubishi group, the CK Birla Group, Hinduja Group etc-who prefer us to cater to their businesses across industries and country locations.

For every customer- we configure HONO, not only to the specific needs of the industry and country location – but also to the specific needs of that organization. We work closely with our customer’ HR teams to uncover and solve their most pressing HR challenges, and meticulously tailor our solution to ensure that these challenges are effectively addressed.

Our large and diverse customer base includes – Mitsubishi Electric, ThaiReinsurance, Federal Electric Corporation, PSD infrastructure (all in Thailand), Marriott International, the Accor Group, IHG Hotels, Pacific Indomas, Fore Coffee, The Harvest Bakery Chain, Hindalco Industries (Aditya Birla Group), Philippine Dealing Systems (PDS group), Affinity-X (Ayala Corporation, Philippines), Atlantic Gulf&Pacific, NBC Bearings, PGP Glass, Terrapay, 3i infotech and Eveready Industries. As you can see – our customers are some of the largest and most successful businesses across Asia, and come from a variety of industries.

How does HONO’s AI-driven approach enhance HR processes and decision-making for business? 

HONO approach to AI, is to build and deliver REAL and IMPACTFUL solutions using AI to our customers. We were the first to understand the transformative potential of AI in its application to Human Capital Management Technology and have built AI driven features into all modules in our solution. Let me explain with a few examples. Let’s take the process of recruitment. HONO’s AI enabled recruitment allows easy parsing of resumes in any language – allowing HONO to understand the contents of the resume, score the resume, determine the candidate’s suitability for a particular role, and recommend the top candidates for any open position in the system. All of this is done in a few seconds without the need for human intervention. This saves time and effort for the recruiter. We can also automatically generate Job descriptions and transcribe video interviews, and generate interview questions and more.

Similarly, our AI powered chatbot answers employees queries related to policy documents. We have also built features like “intelligent payslip” to guide the employee to understand his pay calculations, automated generation and suggestion of role and designation specific KPIs for performance management. This saves time and effort for both the employees and the HR teams.

Our customers see that their important processes like Performance Management Cycles, Recruitment, Learning Programs etc. are running faster and more efficiently with HONO.

What are some common challenges companies face in human capital management, and how does HONO help address them? 

In our conversations with CEOs and CHROs- the most common challenge we see is that of misalignment between the organization’s business objectives (especially on meeting operational goals, regulatory compliance, risk management and earning employee trust) and the ground reality. HCM Technology does not help to bridge this misalignment. HCM solutions are rigid and not configurable or adaptable to the specific needs of the Thai market and do not solve the specific pain points of the industry or that specific enterprise.

HONO always starts customer engagement by deeply understanding pain points and the most pressing challenges that HONO needs to solve. Our solution is fully configurable, easily scalable and is continuously supported with new feature releases. We are fully compliant to regulatory and compliance requirements in Thailand and all of the countries where we operate.

We have also seen challenges on operational performance of the HCM solution- including problems arising from data not being consistent across different modules of the HCM system. Also-challenges related to Audit trails, Data security, Reporting and Analytics, training and employee adoption of the HCM solution, and are commonly reported. HONO utilizes a “Single Source of Truth” which consolidates data across all its modules -ensuring that data is accurate and seamless, without inaccuracies. We conform to global standard on data security and risk management. As part of our implementation- we also ensure training of our customers and provide access to our Knowledge Management portal to all of our users for self learning -this ensuring high adoption.

Lastly we also see industry specific challenges. For e.g. Hospitality Chains, Hospitals and other similar organizations face challenges in tracking Overtime, Break and Shift management, Compensatory holiday management etc. Retail chains additionally may face challenges related to lack of real time analytics, different policies, and rules to be applied in different geographies, time consuming payroll processing etc. Multi industry conglomerates face challenges related to leveraging talent across different group companies, complex multi country payroll requirements and getting a ‘single view’ of HR data cutting across countries and group companies. HONO has built solutions for solving all of these challenges, which we have brought to Thailand and all countries, so that our customers can tackle these challenges from Day-1.

Can you share examples of how your software has improved employee retention or overall satisfaction within companies? 

HONO has shown strong results in delivering on metrics like employee retention, satisfaction scores, transaction times, cost and efforts saved for HR teams etc. Some recent successes have been with “The Harvest”, which is Indonesia’s leading bakery retail chain. HONO helped streamline their performance management system, reduced payroll processing time by 50%, improve learning outcomes for their staff through its learning management system and improved employee adoption of HONO through its mobile enabled employee portal and application. 

For ‘Eveready Industries’, a major manufacturer of batteries and electrical appliances, HONO helped reduce employee attribution through trend dashboards that help identify potential attrition risks, and though deployment of HONO’s employee engagement platform “HONO Social”, and its integrated rewards and recognition module. 

I would also like to mention an innovative solution to solve for absenteeism management that will definitely resonate with Thai enterprises. For ‘NBC bearings’ (a large manufacturing enterprise)- HONO is able to accurately predict absenteeism for each production line using Artificial Intelligence, and then suggest suitable replacements to compensate the absenteeism proactively. This helps reduce impact on business through improved work force availability -all with real time data visibility.

Our culture of listening deeply to our customers and being flexible to accommodate their requirements ensures more such successes.

What’s next for HONO? Any new features or updates planned?  

HONO has an ambitious growth plan. In Asia- HONO is growing at a rapid pace, acquiring Large Multi-Country Enterprises as customers in Thailand and other countries. We plan to expand to more countries in Asia (Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia & more) and also to more countries in the Middle East and Africa in the next 12 months.  We are also focusing on building a strong network of partners for providing Payroll solutions and Channel partnerships across the world.

We are excited with our growth trajectory, customer acceptance, our high customer satisfaction scores, and positive user feedback from leading organizations in Thailand. We have already gone ‘live’ with leading enterprises like ThaiReinsurance and Mitsubishi Electric. We have several more launches coming up in the next few months, for more large enterprises. 

You will see HONO continuously launching new features every month. HCM technology and specifically: Generative AI use within the HCM space is a fast evolving space and HONO will continue to lead this evolution. We also plan to expand our payroll solution to more than 50 countries in the next 1-2 years.

We see ourselves as being recognized among the Top 10 HCM solutions in the world by 2025 and in the Top 5 HCM solutions globally by 2027.

Let’s talk a little about you. What do you enjoy when you are not working? 

I enjoy connecting with new people through coaching programs, which not only allow me to expand my network but also help me gain new knowledge and insights. I also like to swim and engage in a small amount of meditation, which helps me stay focused and centered. Most importantly, I value spending time with my family, especially by attending my kids’ sports activities, which is always a source of joy and inspiration for me. 

What made you choose Antares Offices as your home base for your company? 

We chose Antares Offices because they offer a complete package of services that perfectly fits our business needs. Their flexibility, professionalism, and wide range of offerings—from serviced offices to accounting and legal support—allow us to focus on growing our business while they take care of the operational essentials. Additionally, the central location and high-quality facilities make it easy for us to collaborate with clients and partners across Thailand and the region. 

How can readers get in touch with you?

You can reach me directly at:

• Phone: +66 816820909
• Email: boonchoo.malhotra@hono.ai

We extend our sincere gratitude to Mr. Boonchoo Malhotra, HONO’s Country Director for Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia for sharing his invaluable insights. His commitment to advancing HR technology, particularly through Generative AI-driven features, is empowering organizations and employees worldwide. Thank you for driving workforce success through innovation and excellence.

If you would like to be featured in our Member Spotlight, please send us an email at enquiry@antaresoffices.com or discuss with one of our staff, today!