As operations and movement of goods came to a halt, suppliers could not fulfill orders. The consequent demand-supply mismatch and falling inventory levels became a challenge. With a high percentage of the workforce not being able to report to work, overall productivity was impacted, as many processes were still manual. The quality of products/services was also affected, and regulatory and compliance issues loomed large.

础苍听听aims to understand the state of the mid-market segment in the aftermath of the second wave of COVID-19.听

Covering six different industries, the study was comprehensive in representing the importance of technology for an industry. The study covered over 350 mid-market enterprises – across chemicals, industrial manufacturing, life sciences (including pharma and pharma manufacturing), professional services (including IT/IT-enabled Services), retail and consumer packaged goods and EC&O (engineering, construction, and operations) industries. These enterprises reported annual revenues in the range of INR 500 crore鈥揑NR 2,000 crore. Among the respondents, more than half were C-level executives; the remaining occupy roles such as Director and above in their organization.听

Companies that had pivoted on technology were able to cope with disruptive forces. Indeed, successive waves of COVID-19 have brought the importance of technology in businesses to the fore, as lockdown measures across the world disrupted supply chains.听

Those ahead in the technology adoption curve raced to build digital resiliency鈥攖he ability to adapt rapidly to business disruptions by leveraging existing digital capabilities to restore business operations as well as capitalize on the changed conditions.

The study provided interesting insights into digital resiliency and its components, including business and IT priorities of Indian mid-market enterprises, such as:听

• Providing smoother customer journeys in the virtual space became a priority after the pandemic. Now, 40% of mid-market enterprises are taking an end-to-end approach to manage and customize user journeys across departments. During the pandemic, employee retention was a top challenge for human resources teams at these mid-market enterprises. Half of these enterprises are now adopting organization-wide technology initiatives to enhance employee engagement.
• Hopes of revival hold as three-fourths of all enterprises studied expect their operations to return to pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021.听

For mid-market enterprises, business revival and digital resiliency are intertwined goals to work towards. Almost 83% of the enterprises studied said they were focusing on resiliency objectives like business continuity, to ensure operations remain unaffected due to disruptions in the future. To build operational resiliency, these enterprises brought in process automation to improve their operations and serve customers. An important step: focus on the management and improvement of customer journeys.

As the mid-market segment innovates and improvises, notwithstanding their limited resources, the pertinent question is about their business and technology priorities in the future.

What are the business and technology priorities of mid-market enterprises for 2022 and beyond?

With the need for digital transformation becoming evident, mid-market enterprises have truly embraced the power of digital to create agility, flexibility, and scalability. Optimistic about revival, 74% of enterprises in India will increase or retain their spend on IT security, governance, and risk management in 2022.

Exact priorities depend upon the perceived importance of technology in an industry. Highly regulated industries, for instance, are driving adoption of data management and security technologies. These sectors include banking and financial services, healthcare and pharma, and professional services. However, better customer service through touchless solutions, uninterrupted operations through automation, and seamless user experience through self-service options are also important. In other words, top business and technology priorities are centered on employee and customer engagement, security, and modernization to improve operations.

The IDC InfoBrief commissioned by 麻豆原创, ‘The State of Midmarket Enterprises in India: A Perspective on Digital Resiliency’, identified the following as the top business priorities of the mid-market enterprises for 2021鈥�22:

• Increase customer engagement and satisfaction
• Increase employee engagement, productivity, and skills
• Create new products and services using technology and data
• Secure business and data by improving security posture

Even in the face of a business disruption, a digitally resilient organization鈥檚 workforce remains not only secure but also productive, engaged, agile and adaptive. Having understood this, mid-market enterprises are now prioritizing strategic initiatives for better employee engagement. These include:

• Upgraded network connectivity for better productivity and security
• Cloud-based collaboration solutions
• Simplifying and automating employee/HR related activities
• Frequently used applications enabled or configured on mobile

Retaining existing customers and acquiring new customers is another area of prime focus. For this, enterprise investment is focused on end-to-end seamless customer lifecycle management. Priorities include customer engagement platforms, mobile enablement, social media management platforms or capabilities, and customer analytics platforms.

To help achieve employee and customer-centric business objectives, the top technology priorities for 2021鈥�22 are: 听

• Support work from home: productivity without disruptions
• Gain insights into business operations, products, and services
• Customer experience programs like loyalty programs, personalization, etc.
• Application upgrades, workload migration to cloud (Software as a Service)

Modernization and cloud will be key imperatives in the Digital Resiliency narrative. And the top drivers behind application modernization initiatives:

• Cognitive capabilities to integrate AI and analytic capabilities
• Enterprise digital transformation agenda to increase business agility, innovation and deliver enhanced experiences
• Gaining competitive edge
• Improving time to market
• Talent shortage
• Better security听

Enterprises are looking to boost their IT investments in cloud, cybersecurity, analytics, and business intelligence, as well as productivity applications, to stay competitive. Some of the key initiatives include migrating on-premises applications to cloud, securing data and systems, automating operations, and digitalizing the entire customer journey.

While almost 74% of the mid-market enterprises intend to migrate more applications to cloud, many other enterprises (46%) are looking to craft a hybrid cloud strategy. Agility, performance, and availability were the key drivers for adoption of hybrid cloud platforms. Here, identifying the right deployment model for the right workload and having a single pane of control to manage hybrid cloud environments is critical.听

So, what does this mean for you?

While mid-market enterprises realize the role of technology in their business to build digital resilience, most of them are working towards stabilizing operations and bringing them to normalcy. If you are the leader of a mid-market organization that is on the same path, you must power your engines to propel through the journey so that you can shift your sight to focus on elements of digital resiliency.听

罢丑别听four fundamental implications听for a mid-market enterprise like yours include:

1. Leverage automation and analytics: Mid-market enterprises struggled during the pandemic from lack of automation in their operations. There is a need to increase the level of automation and data-driven analytics to withstand any turbulence in the digital-first future we are stepping into.
2. Contain cost with cloud: Like most mid-market enterprises, if you intend to reduce your IT spending for on-premises business applications, invest in cloud-based business applications to reduce capital investments as well as increase business agility.
3. Optimize customer and employee engagement: Employee and customer engagement need more IT investments. Specially to attract and retain customers, you need to build systems that enable multi-channel engagement and manage your customer journeys end-to-end.
4. Put risk safeguards in place:听As more enterprises move towards a hybrid cloud model, the need for a secure architecture will be paramount. You should look at solutions that help scale and perform with no security glitches. With the ever-expanding threat landscape, you must prioritize risk management services in the future.

In conclusion

The mid-market segment has immense potential to unlock India鈥檚 growth story, especially in the smaller towns and cities. And this can be fast tracked by increasing the role of technology in business. However, before mid-market enterprises look at building Digital Resiliency, they must get their operations back to pre-pandemic levels. By utilizing the power of cloud, mid-market enterprises can actualize their potential and gain access to process efficiencies demonstrated by bigger players. To find out how to accelerate your journey to becoming digitally resilient and setting yourself up for success in the long run,听听on 鈥楽tate of Mid-Market Enterprises in India, a Perspective on Digital Resiliency鈥�.

All of the above data points are derived from ‘IDC InfoBrief commissioned by 麻豆原创, The State of Midmarket Enterprises in India, A Perspective on Digital Resiliency, December 2021, Doc.#AP241284IB

The post Role of Technology in Creating Business Resilience in Mid-Market Companies appeared first on 麻豆原创 India News Center.

With approximately听听currently contributing to approximately听听towards India鈥檚 GDP through national and international trade, this robust growth is welcome news after last year鈥檚 contraction of 24.4%. However, this level of success cannot last forever.

MSMEs must capitalise on today鈥檚 red-hot economy to rebuild their operations for sustained resiliency like any other company. But equally important, according to听, is their ability to anticipate risks and initiate change while avoiding adverse consequences along the way.

Finding the Way to Business Success

One of the biggest challenges facing MSMEs is increasing production capacity or expanding market reach to satisfy worldwide demand. But investing more money in existing facilities and building new ones is not enough. Companies should also plan their future digital strategies 鈥� whether gradually migrating their existing IT landscape to the cloud or immediately adopting new forms of digitalisation.

For organisations that have never fully embraced technology, this moment is a critical differentiator as they enter the national and world stages.

A听 already recognise the importance of an intelligent, data-driven platform to enable speed, innovation, and increased efficiency in every aspect of the midsize businesses.

For example,听听quickly shifted from one-on-one, face-to-face meetings with customers, partners, and other stakeholders by using collaboration and self-service tools that help ensure continuous communication and order-taking in various languages.听, on the other hand, accelerated its digital adoption plans to make daily work more efficient by automating simple activities, such as transferring money. And听, which was already underway in its digital transformation before the pandemic, maintained 24×7 continuity and growth.

While such success stories can be exciting, this is not where the impact of digitalisation ends.听听revealed that 28% of surveyed midsize companies plan to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) within their business applications to automate processes.

Such听听is important for MSMEs when you consider half of them lost revenue in 2020. By transforming operations with the cloud, AI, and other intelligent technology, companies decrease their chances of experiencing further loss by as much as 10%.

Building Agility with Experience and Guidance

听helps MSMEs optimize the advantages of the cloud to drive business agility. For example, our听听and听听programme empower Indian MSMEs to nurture self-actualised professional and personal success. Organisations can develop business agility by observing and learning from businesses that share their challenges, demonstrating new ideas, and proving new possibilities. Over time, they gain a level of resilience that enables them to proactively fend off risks and disruption better than their competition.

Ready to renew your sense of resilience? Read the IDC paper, 鈥�,鈥� sponsored by 麻豆原创.

Source:

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What is a MSME?

The Government of India has enacted the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Development (MSMED) Act, 2006 micro, small and medium enterprises engaged in the manufacture or production, processing or preservation of goods as specified by investment. A micro enterprise is an enterprise where investment in plant and machinery does not exceed Rs. 25 lakh, a small enterprise is one where the investment is more than Rs. 25 lakh but does not exceed Rs. 5 crore and finally a medium enterprise is one where investment is more than Rs.5 crore but does not exceed Rs.10 crore.

MSMEs may be categorized into Trading, Manufacturing, or Service enterprises based on their activities. The individuals promoting each type of enterprise demonstrate distinctive characteristics. Traders are very good with numbers. Manufacturing set-ups are created by Technology enthusiasts passionate about a problem they would like to solve. Service Enterprises work with a mindset to improve the life of the target client base with their services. These enterprises experience different growth curves based on a variety of External and Internal factors. While External factors are beyond their controls, the SMEs need to work on the internal factors to ensure that they remain agile to capitalize on the growth opportunities.

Ongoing Pandemic and resultant lockdowns have hampered the economic activities globally. The cascading effect on SMEs has been distressing. Globally, more than 90% of the SMEs have been impacted. These SMEs reported Revenue Decline in the range from 20% to 90%. Adoption of Technology proved to be the critical factor for the SMEs to resume operations under restrictions.

Historically, an economic downturn of this magnitude leads to a bigger peak in the subsequent recovery cycle. The Economic Recovery has already started. Various international agencies have reported the developing economies to grow between 8 to 12% this year. This recovery will create tremendous growth opportunities for SMEs.

To prepare for the growth opportunities in the post-COVID World, all the SMEs need to:

• Assess their Current Situation realistically
• Benchmark Themselves against peers and industry standards
• Identify strategies to address their current challenges and grow

In this article, we are going to focus on the Assessment part.

Assessing the situation

We are going through unprecedented times. The MSME owners or Management has not faced such situations earlier. Hence, all the stakeholders must come together and realistically assess the status. As the situation is continuously evolving, the company also needs to calibrate the response periodically. For successful calibration, the company will need to create a baseline.

To establish this baseline, MSME Owners need to review their business in the following 3 phases:

• Pre-COVID Era
• Pandemic Period
• Unlocking Phase

SMEs need to take a comprehensive review of their business spanning across all the functional areas.听The following parameters need to be covered. Click here to download the complete checklist

• Financials Aspects
  • Revenue Generated in each Phase
  • Trace changes in Receivables across the 3 phases including:
  • Costs
  • Profit
  • Cash Flow
  • Working Capital
• Operational
  • Plant / Set-up Utilization
  • Equipment Maintenance
  • Inventory
• Human Resources

Assessment of these parameters will help an Entrepreneur / Senior Management get a clear understanding of the status. Having an would be a great advantage as it would capture most of the data required for the assessment. ERPs provide preconfigured reports for Profitability, Monthly Cash Flow and Operational Efficiency. This would enable companies to conduct effective monthly reviews.

In the first of the MSME thought leadership series, we bring you three guides with downloadable checklists to prepare your business to become more agile, efficient and resilient.听In the next article, we will discuss how an your enterprise can benchmark itself against the industry’s best practices.

Midsize businesses today are thinking about how their operational efficiency and agility can help them to weather future storms and seize new opportunities along the way. In fact, 33% of midsize business identify 鈥渂ecoming more agile and flexible鈥� as a top five priority, according to the IDC Info Snapshot, 鈥淏usiness Reimagined: Driving Greater Efficiency and Resiliency,鈥� sponsored by 麻豆原创.

Read the to discover how your business can connect, grow, and win by renewing efficiency and agility with more resilient supply chains, data-driven decision-making, and a workforce supported by intelligent systems.

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