Digital Transformation or Digitization is a term often used in the modern business world when speaking about efficiency and better management for MSMEs. At first, it sounds like a gigantic process which will upturn your business and restart all your processes from scratch! But what it really means, is to integrate innovative technological solutions into pre-existing business processes, step-by-step, to make them smoother, faster, more efficient or even to completely automate them! This saves your business time, money, human resources and gives you better control over of your processes and your data.

Here are some ways that digitization is helping MSMEs grow:

1. A central data storage

If you find yourself managing multiple Excel sheets to store and find your data, your team takes too long to find relevant records rummaging through files, folders, documents and sheets, and the data is scattered all over the teams’ computers and mobile phones; then a software system with a central data storage would be your savior!

A central data storage system can take data from various team members and clients, puts it all at a single secure place and it is made easily accessible by your team! The software

can also provide you with insights into the data; making your business decisions quicker and more informed.

2. Online presence

Reaching out to more and more new customers without spending extensive amount of time has never been easier! With an online presence of your business through a website, introducing customers to your services and products becomes much faster.

With search engine optimization, your website can attract new clients 24x7 organically. Features like online chat software and chatbots can help you communicate with the clients on your website directly. Converting a lead into a sale becomes much easier when your customers make informed decisions after knowing about your services from your website. A website can act as a portfolio, a communication point, a catalogue for products & services, and most importantly, it builds trust with the customers about the business.

3. Digital commerce

Online shopping is everywhere! It is easily accessible anywhere and at any time of the day. If you are looking to take your shop to the next stage, e-commerce is the way to go. With the right online shop set up, you can sell your products to local, national and even international clients! Accommodating online selling into your retail business requires setting up payment gateways, delivery services, product photoshoots and online customer communications. But once these processes are set up, the scalability of your customer base can skyrocket!

If you have multiple vendors that provide products and you would like to set up an online marketplace for them, a multi-vendor ecommerce marketplace is the best solution for you. In a multivendor system: orders reach the vendors automatically; the order fulfillment is updated by the vendors and the admin of the website gets all the updates on-the-go!

4. Streamlining the sales process (CRM)

The question most commonly asked by growing MSMEs is “how to keep up with the expanding customer base, their requirement analysis and the follow-ups?”. It becomes hard for sales executives to keep up with all these follow-ups and reminders for calls and emails.

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software can save a lot of time and make your sales team more efficient to take on more clients. From registering leads with their requirements, their contact details to setting up reminders and sending emails to them and much more – this all can be handled through a single CRM system. The data insights and patterns from this system can help you understand employee performances and help you set your next sales targets as well!

5. Employee onboarding and training

Each new employee that joins an organization goes through training. Introducing them to all the procedures, technical details and company policies is a repetitive task. And not just new employees, but existing employees may also need to get trainings and go through evaluations. To streamline this process, MSMEs can definitely make use of an Employee Learning Management System (LMS).

An LMS can have multiple modules that you can create. Each for a different purpose like HR policies onboarding module, expense sheet creation training module, a module to understand the company’s products and their features for sales team, etc. The modules can have documents, images, videos, text paragraphs and you can add questions and quizzes to assure that the employee has completed the course and assess how much they have understood it. LMS is useful at the time of onboarding, promotions, introduction of new policies and general trainings.

6. Project Management

An overflowing list of to-dos, poorly managed resources, employees missing out on tasks all the time and a manager without any status updates on the project work... If any of these issues are bothering your project management, then a project management (PM) software can help keep these things tidy and organized.

Project Management software is used to draft out a project plan, manage resource utilization and assign tasks to employees, logging working times, manage the project schedule with deadlines and reminders, track issues and their statuses, and have a live visual overview of the ongoing project at any given time for managers and business owners.

Now that we have covered a few ways digitization can be beneficial for your business, you need to know how to take the initiative to get started with digitization! Although any business at any time can go digital, it is best to start involving technology into your organization’s workflow as early as possible. A good technology service provider can provide you with solutions that are perfect for your business. With the state of technology in the world today, there is a technological solution to all of the problems that MSMEs can face; may it be a ready-made or a customized solution. All you need to do is take a step towards digital transformation!

The above article is published by Global Finance Professionals in the book titled "MSME Tool kit".