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.
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