Economic Times (ET): What are the challenges when it comes to bringing traditional small businesses to a digital platform?
Sachin Agarwal (SA): In my opinion, the success of a business hinges on its ability to adapt to the latest technology trends. However, SMEs are still battling the hefty investment required for deploying advanced technologies and improving output. Global statistics reveal that more than 90% of SMEs encounter multiple hurdles while integrating technology into their operational processes.Through my conversation with SMEs over the years, I have realised that they are often unaware of the significant impact that digital transformation can have on business growth, customer retention and customer experience. Consequently, the decision to adopt a digital transformation road map is frequently postponed or neglected altogether. Digital technologies continuously advance, offering customers faster and easier ways to conduct business. SMEs often feel overwhelmed by this rapid pace of change, leading to resistance in adopting these technologies to enhance their operations. Moreover, the financial burden of investing in smart devices, top-notch internet, and cloud services, and hiring skilled employees to manage the transformation adds to their concerns. Besides, conventional businesses find it challenging to store, organise, analyse, and turn data into useful insights for making business decisions.
SA: Technology adoption holds multifold benefits for Indian SMEs. Firstly, it boosts productivity by automating tasks like accounting and inventory management, freeing up time for strategic work. Secondly, it improves customer experience through better communication channels like social media and chatbots, increasing customer loyalty. Thirdly, technology enables easy scaling up without inflated costs, allowing efficient collaboration with remote workers. Embracing technology helps SMEs stay competitive, offer innovative products and make decisions based on data for long-term success and growth opportunities.ET: What are some of the sectors willing to take the leap here?
SA: The steel, auto, agricultural and textiles sectors are among the most eager to embrace digitalisation. They are leveraging cutting-edge technologies to enhance efficiency, productivity, and sustainability in their respective industries.
ET: How can small businesses navigate uncertainty in the market using these tech tools given the slowdown in the global supply chain?
SA: One of our proprietary solutions includes a confidence score of MSMEs, which captures more than 50 live data points and compares them to millions of past B2B transactions. This helps in identifying potential risks and ensuring proactive actions and smooth supply chain operations for enterprises.
Leveraging this data, we are also offering embedded financing through partner banks and NBFCs who can evaluate SMEs based on deep transactional and behavioural insights, allowing them to take better financing calls on SMEs and making it a potent tool for SME growth.
AI-driven analytics also help vendors identify the right products. We have also implemented data-driven decision-making systems to ensure that the right products are sourced at the right price, thus streamlining the entire process and reducing manual errors. This enables customers to reduce costs associated with bulk procurement by automating the process and tracking orders and managing inventory in real time.
ET: Tell us about Bizongo’s InLocate 6.0 solution.
SA: Business growth is exciting, but it can get tricky if warehouse operations are not optimised with effective inventory tracking technology. While the staff on the ground can manually feed information into their warehouse management systems, goods tend to get mislabelled or stocked in the wrong aisles due to modelled human errors. The inevitable cascading effect on the next set of inventory units makes it practically impossible to track goods and ship inventory faster.
Oftentimes, a factory’s expensive man hours, which could be used to enhance productivity, are spent searching for the possible location of goods. This makes it even more important to have a physical tracking technology solution that can be used in conjunction with RFID, a warehouse management system and a barcode-based solution to optimise efficiency.
Our internal positioning system, InLocate 6.0 has the potential to transform tracking inventory, machinery and people with an accuracy of 10 cm in indoor and outdoor environments. The bottleneck range is 2 to 20 metres. The patented technology enables live location visibility, process monitoring, deviation alerts and provides data-driven insights.
