Almost immediately they send him down to Malaysia to run one of their ailing textile factories. He has no experience in the garment industry, no formal management training or experience, and is not only unfamiliar with Malaysia but has in fact spent the last decade living outside Asia.

"When I first walked into the factory," says Harry Lee, "I'd never even seen a spindle before. But there I was in charge of a factory of 600,000 square feet, 3,000 employees, 90,000 spindles and 1,500 weaving looms. And it was losing a million Malaysian dollars a month."

It took just six months for the young electrical engineer to get the factory to break even point, and on the fast track to becoming a successful, profitable business.

The experience was the beginning of a lifetime of achievement for Harry Lee. The young engineer suddenly found himself at home and comfortable in a new world far from laboratories and theories. And although he never went back to engineering, the working procedures, techniques and thinking processes he had cultivated as part of his engineering training provided a remarkably effective foundation for his future business success.

"For example," he says, "when I first arrived in that Malaysian factory it was chaotic. There were no systems, no training, workers were using identical machines in completely different ways. A mess. There was a group of Japanese technicians looking after some of the new machines, and they'd come around and say, 'That's not right, that's not right', but nobody took any notice of them. I took them aside and said, 'Write down the ten things we need to do most urgently to solve these problems. Not eleven, not nine, just ten things. Then, when we've corrected any one of those items so that you're satisfied it's right, cross it off the list and add one more.' One of the first things to come from that was a training scheme that taught all the workers to use their machines in the correct way. Needless to say, productivity increased dramatically.

"And I asked questions all the time. 'What's this? Why are you doing this?' I wouldn't take the first person's answer. I'd keep asking the same questions again and again to different people, then try to make a logical deduction: 'Which of these answers seems to be correct?' And as I had no idea what was wrong, I'd simply ask the staff to tell me what was wrong. It's crucial to identify the problem-or perhaps it's a whole range of problems, or maybe even an interlocking network of problems-before you can work on a solution. When I came up with a solution, I'd also test it by asking people questions: 'Will this work? Is this the best thing we can do in this situation?' You start to gain an understanding of what's happening, and what really needs to be done.

"It is part of my background. A lot of engineering is about confronting problems and arriving at the best solution-which often isn't the one you expect in the beginning. To understand problems, my professor at Brown (university in the USA) made me ask questions all the time. Now it's something that I always do. And it helps that I'm very patient. That's also part of my engineer's nature."

Patience certainly helped Harry Lee with his next challenge. With the business in Malaysia running smoothly, Lee's family decided to utilize his skills in Thailand, where their company, TAL (Tal Apparel Limited), had two garment factories. The day before he arrived, one of them burned down.

"My job brief suddenly changed somewhat," says Harry Lee with a smile. " The first priority was not to run the factory-I had to rebuild it." It turned out that the premises were insured by five different insurance companies, and negotiating with them all in the convoluted business environment of Thailand at that time was certainly a test of patience as well as skill. But within nine months, the factory had been rebuilt, and was running successfully. With his mission accomplished, it was time to move on to new challenges.

Zero inventory

Harry Lee returned to Hong Kong at the end of 1979 to join TAL's garment manufacturing division. Despite the fact that the family business had extended through Asia and their manufacturing base was very strong, he soon began to notice areas of operation that he felt could be significantly improved. One of these was improving the speed and efficiency of the supply chain flow of orders, from manufacturer to customer, in order to reduce the client's need to carry inventory.

"The ideal," says Harry Lee, "is zero inventory. Carrying excess goods in a big warehouse hurts everyone. The wholesalers and retailers are gambling on their orders being right, they even have to buy more stock than they need to cover themselves, and they have to pay the cost of the warehousing. The result is a big mark-up in the price of the item, for which the consumer pays. The adverse results for wholesalers and retailers are seen every year in seasonal sales in which items are offered at loss-making prices simply to liquidate huge amounts of unsold stock.

"Electronic systems-computers," says Harry Lee, "have the potential to do away with inventory. Ideally, you should only order what's purchased by the consumer, the end user. We have the technology to make things like garments very rapidly after they're ordered. Think of days gone by in Asia when garments were made by tailors, and the customer simply chose the style and the fabric. But the tailor only had one or two simple sewing machines. These days garment factories have hundreds, even thousands of sophisticated, specialized high speed machines, and a well-designed computer system can control the ordering in seconds from anywhere in the world."

It took many years-and much steady development-before Lee was able to see his "zero inventory" concepts start to come to fruition. But by 1995 he had convinced one of the largest retail chains in the USA, JC Penney, to try his methods. Every cash register in Penney's garment stores was linked to computers in TAL headquarters in Hong Kong. The moment a garment was purchased in the Penney's store the order was recorded in Hong Kong, and a re-order instantly passed to the appropriate garment factory in Asia, along with shipping instructions. Just a few days after each transaction, a replacement garment was on its way to the store where the original garment was purchased. Though still falling a little short of the ideal "zero inventory", it enabled Penney's to vastly reduce the stock they carry, to minimize wastage and error in their ordering, and to reduce prices while increasing profit. Penney now uses the system in all their stores in the USA, and other retailers, including LL Bean, are starting to take advantage of it. Though few people know their name, TAL has become one of the biggest garment manufacturers in the world (eg an estimated one in eight dress shirts sold in the USA are made by TAL.)

Flowing the numbers

TAL's success has also made them a shining example of a local company using the full potential of e-commerce systems to achieve global success. Lee is quick to point out that this was by no means an easy, or straightforward process.

"In the beginning," he said, "we started out doing what everyone else did: introducing computers into one division at a time, and then when we wanted to link them, finding that they wouldn't talk to each other, we had to re-do the whole thing. But we worked at it, and we started to get it right.

"The ideals that I seek are to be completely paperless and to have a shared database where information is readily available to everyone who needs to use it. By paperless, I mean the information needs to be able to flow directly into the system in electronic format. That not only reduces input time and inefficiency, it minimizes the chances of introducing errors. It's fast and efficient. Then the information needs to be available so anyone can extract it and use it as they wish. There's a lot of ways you can look at information, you can see things that others mightn't see, do the things you need to do much more effectively.

"That doesn't mean you need a massive computer set-up, or even that I advocate vast computer systems. It still all happens in the mind. Technology is just a tool. It's the attitude, the willingness to use the tool properly, and to see just how much it will really do for you, that really counts. It's also essential-absolutely essential-that if you're going to make the most of the opportunities offered by e-commerce your business is properly set-up for it, both the internal systems and operations as well as the external activities.

E-commerce is not just something that happens when you decide to take your goods or services out of your factory or office. It's a complete, integrated way of working, and every part of your operation has to be correctly set-up for the work it has to perform. That's more about business management than computers.

"And as for the size of systems, there is so much good hardware and software out there, even a small SME can get well set up for a minimal investment. And if you take the right approach even simple spreadsheet programs give you the opportunity to extract information and look at it in many different ways, which inevitably results in a much better understanding of what's going on."

Linking the future

Harry Lee's passion for e-commerce inevitably brought him into contact with Tradelink. TAL quickly became one of Tradelink's best customers, and the two companies developed close commercial ties. Recently, Lee was named Chairman of the Board of Tradelink, and is looking forward to the new challenge-and the opportunity to bring e-commerce to more businesses in Hong Kong.

"Our primary goal," says Lee, "is to create a situation where essentially all trading operations can become completely paperless. This means a vast network that links everyone from banks and the Government through to transportation and shipping companies, manufacturers, retailers, importers, exporters-everybody. The whole spectrum. That alone will mean big savings, but it will also create a system that offers unprecedented efficiency in operations.

"That's a big goal" concedes Lee, " a big challenge. And it's just the beginning. But then my motto has always been, 'Anything's possible.'"