Lack of understanding and knowledge about digital tools for communication has resulted in only 34 per cent of Indian MSMEs adopting digital means to interactions with employees, customers, and suppliers. Venkatraman Subramanian, a leading  business process coach who had also worked as a tech leader for organizations shares how MSMEs should embrance and adopt technology in their organization. Edited excepts.

Where do Indian MSMEs mostly fail in IT policy or implementation or procurements?

 Goals should always achievable and must be realistic based on facts and figures from historical data. Overlaying plan which significantly affects the implementation. No proper internal communication.  No proper team members and undefined roles for them and it is imperative to have a dedicated team for any successful implementation. Most of resources in MSMEs play a key role and hence result in delay of giving time. Lack of a dedicated project owner to drive the project and no backup plan. 

 What are the 3 basic rules of MSME to have a seamless work functioning?

 MSMEs should ensure to a provide Great customer experience, as customer is always the king for any business. They also should have proper, effective and efficient feedback system, so as to make the customer support to its best and also improvise the internal system.

Ensure to be equipped with proper systems in place so that everything can be automated, thus make the monitoring / escalation easy to handle. 

With the geography of businesses for MSMEs are growing they have challenges in managing their business remotely, what kind of technology infrastructure will help them?

 Earlier days technologies were not affordable though, however these days with the upgraded technologies especially with 4g/5g network along with latest smart phones, everything is in our hand.. However, a word of caution, we need to effectively and efficiently use it. If a business into product selling, E-Com technologies can be used to reach more people PAN India and it is now with digital payment option. Lot of online software packages has been launched which ease the job of managing the branches seamlessly, especially for monitoring and MIS reports that too most economical.

 Many MSMEs feel that resources for IT are always expensive or extra-cost center, how can you advocate it is a profit-making center?

 It is a myth. Before 6 months, many companies were reluctant to use technologies like zoom, team viewer, goto meeting, webex,gpay,paytm as they felt it was expenses and security threat for their data. However because of this pandameic situation, they were pushed to upgrade to use these these technologies. Isn’t it huge savings in terms of their time, money and all those contribute to profit centre. To exist in the market and competition, one must use the cutting edge technology solution to market their products and giving customer a wow experience. Now digital marketing, sending SMS, Whatsapp automater, basic erp software, billing software, Tally are few softwares which are mandatory to run the business.

How this pandemic according to you, will change the way companies look at technologies?

Change is evitable and this pandemic has brought a shift in thought process of many organisation to utilize the technologies to its fullest potential. We predict more cloud-based software to access it from anywhere concept will evolve. Work from home concept has become to gain momentum during this period irrespective of the industry and will continue.