Innovations level playing field for SMEs to take on big firms

Matatu Owners Association chairman Simon Kimutai (left) with Nairobi Senator Mike Mbuvi Sonko and Tigania East MP Mpuri Aburi at the launch of a cashless fare payment service last month. File 

By Mbugua Njihia

In Summary

Electronic commerce is growing and with that comes the need to streamline the often times broken brick and mortar experience and process employed by SMEs.

Small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) the world over are backbone of the economy yet many times have the odds stacked against them on many fronts.

 

Big enterprises often have a technology arsenal at their disposal whether playing in agriculture, manufacturing and even services. In this arsenal, you will find enterprise resource planning platforms and customer relationship management portals, among others, unique to the industry.

The total cost of ownership has been prohibitive in the past with vendors such as Oracle, Sales Force and SAP creaming the market on deployment and annual licence fees.

The landscape is changing with traditional vendors and new entrants now targeting the SME space with affordable cloud-based solutions that, if adopted and utilised well, will help level the playing field by bringing increased efficiency and transparency.

Safaricom made a foray into this space with a Sage Pastel play with a promise of more tools to come. I have my list of favourite, locally built services having had a chance to take them for a spin.

Uhasibu makes for an excellent accounting service that does all the heavy lifting in a no frills way and removes the headache of rushing to beat the taxman’s deadlines. Their recent release of a project-based accounting module extends their utility to the NGO and public sectors that are largely driven by grants.

Electronic commerce is growing and with that comes the need to streamline the often times broken brick and mortar experience and process employed by SMEs. WezaTele has shown good growth and market sensitivity in the area of commerce, supply chain and distribution and their partnership with Odoo an ERP provider expands their value proposition.

Payments are a hot space with different service providers attacking the opportunity uniquely. PesaPal, Lipisha and Kopo Kopo are almost constantly on the radar on this front, reducing cost of revenue collection. 

The service gap opportunity that remains, however, is one that will shorten the time to payment fulfilment that cripples many SMEs, especially when doing high volume business. Large corporations are known to trade on their supplier margins and even fund their growth from the lifeblood of the SME.

This will be a tough one to deploy as it may require legislation that the SMEs have no clout to push for, not to mention banks are not likely to easily conform or pressure their big accounts think differently. W

With SMEs covering all sectors there is still room for focused retooling of technology to address the numerous niches available, profitably.

Mr Njihia is CEO of Symbiotic. Twitter - @mbuguanjihia.