Digitalisation and Tech-adoption as the Key to Improving Productivity of SMEs Across Business Functions

Himanshu Singla
Founder- Online Trouble Shooters
Webmaster at People's Blog - MorningTea.in

Systematic approach and centralized architecture can speed up the growth of SMEs. SMEs can increase efficiency, can go to global markets, save money on products, maintain a high quality standard. Technological change and adapting new technology is a must for a growing organization despite its size.

Following Traditional methodology is an old era now, turnaround time expected by a customer for any query, delivery of product has to be on fingers. Who has thought that we would be buying small things on online marketplace and getting things delivered on doorstep? In the traditional era, communicating between one business departments to another was the pain area. Loss in production, good lying unsupplied, non-availability of goods even supply forecast is very high, purchasing of raw material at high price, fast movement of skilled and unskilled people has been the challenging areas for any SME.

With use of digitisation and adapting new technology had created an easy connection between Internal Company (departments), customers, dealers, third party companies.

Imagine paying taxes used to be cumbersome, after a GST thing has become a lot easier for companies and they can track the taxes without visiting government authorities.

Production can look forward to purchase a cheaper raw material thought the globe and can also learn other faster production mechanism for different countries. Availability of high end technology machines has reduced product hours thus helping SMEs to reduce the cost to secondary buyer or end customer.
There are still a big number of SMEs out there, who are missing the era of digitalisation. But on a stage they will enforced by the industry standards, economical changes, expectations from stakeholders to make rapid changes at a global scale.

“Going paperless organization is like a challenge for SMEs, as digitalizing not only helps them to reduce cost but also to bring things available at ease.”

Any SME can follow the technological trend with some steps

  1. Survey within Departments: Learn from your team, knowing there unproductive time, helping them resolve and upgrading their skills. SMEs can easily create a survey and share among all departments to get an exact overview of the thoughts from their team.
  2. Investing in Tools; Digitalisations means using tools for every work we do. They are like functions and strengths of a business unit. SME should keep in mind to select only tools which have enough flexibility to not only help organization to grow but also to adapt new upcoming technology changes in anticipation.
  3. Connecting Customers Digitally: Using technology advancements, we can easily outnumber the reach to customers, to understand there change of preferences before they even think of moving to our competitors.
  4. Integrate with third party vendors, suppliers. How about your suppliers know your requirement before even you had asked for. Possible technological secure integrations between companies help to reduce communication time and enhance high scale of production.
  5. Automations:  In Small Budgets, SME can almost automate their major activities, which will make internal team engage more with less errors or we can call it as error free zone.
Technology is not a curse if followed with proper strategy and analysis. It has helped companies to go big in a short period of time. If not followed, had also led to the closure of many businesses.