An IT firm, caught on paper.
One hard truth about running a business: something always goes wrong. A key team member leaves. A critical partner folds. Or a global pandemic sends everyone home for months.
Maximum Solutions Corporation — known as MSCorp — has been in business since March 2001. An IT solutions and manpower provider based in Manila, with two hundred staff spread across the country. The kind of company that helps other Philippine firms go digital.
When COVID hit in 2020, a particular kind of irony landed: the IT solutions provider had internal workflows still built on paper and spreadsheets. The lockdown broke the model overnight. Three requirements, non-negotiable, all at once:
- Go paperless. Physical paper routing was no longer viable.
- Work from anywhere. Two hundred staff needed the same systems from home.
- Ship during a crisis. Whatever the solution was, it had to roll out fast — no six-month implementation windows.
SAP was priced out.
No-code was doubted. Then Kintone proved both wrong.
MSCorp looked at what any enterprise would look at first. SAP was an obvious candidate — and, as published in the Kintone story, quickly ruled out. The implementation cost was heavy and the learning curve was steep, neither of which suited a company trying to ship a platform in weeks, not quarters.
When Kintone came up — introduced by a local Kintone partner — the reaction was the one we see often: skepticism. No-code was not yet a well-known category in the Philippines. Questions about privacy, security, and how steep the learning curve might actually be. All fair. All reasonable.
What closed the gap was a Kintone consultant walking them through the trial and, where needed, building custom apps alongside MSCorp's team. That direct, hands-on support is what we still deliver to every client engagement today — no pitch deck, no reading list, just someone who'll sit down and build the first few apps with you.
Three factors swung the decision: cost-effectiveness, speed of implementation, and flexibility.
We no longer have to sign the pile of papers that has been compiled each week. Now we can remove delays by just managing the process and completing approvals digitally in Kintone. Thanks to this we have three times less printing to do, saving us a lot of time and costs.— Paolo · Sales & Account Manager, MSCorp
From twelve apps to a hundred.
Paolo led the first build. Together with a Kintone consultant, his sales team replaced their paper-and-spreadsheet workflow with twelve connected apps — one for each stage of the order process. Internal communications migrated onto Kintone. A management dashboard went up so leadership had a permanent, real-time view of where attention was needed.
That was the beginning. The platform's reach across MSCorp grew fast from there.
By the time the story was published by Kintone, MSCorp had deployed over a hundred custom apps across forty-nine registered users, serving:
Surviving the bad times is the business.
Kintone has a view on this that we share at edamame: long-term company success isn't just how well you run when the market is kind. It's how you hold up when something breaks. Modern no-code platforms — deployed with a good partner — build that resilience into the core of the business.
MSCorp didn't just clear their three initial requirements. They came out of the crisis with a more cost-effective operation, firsthand digital transformation experience, and a new level of interdepartmental collaboration. Enough conviction, in fact, that they're now looking to become a certified Kintone partner themselves.
This case study is paraphrased from the original customer story "A Quick and Painless Transition to Paperless" published by Kintone Corporation on kintone.com. All metrics and direct quotes are as reported by Kintone. Interview conducted June 2022.