The Fifth Elephant 2012

Understand the relevance of better use of data in SME planning - and think of various architectures / solutions that can be fit the problem

Outline

Most mature Small / Medium enterprises (SMEs) have their workflow digitized. Transactions - purchases, sales are captured in an IT system. However, these IT systems are primarily used transactionally - for billing, receivables, cash flow, balance sheet, and inventory.

Decision making in SMEs is largely the entrepreneur’s intuition driven. More objectivity, however, can be brought about in this decision making by using the historical transactional data for forecasting, production / purchase planning, pricing, marketing planning and much more.

Entrepreneur’s own low understanding of what can be done with data, low prevalence of business analytics skill sets amongst the local software vendors, and absence of an affordable ready to use smart analytics products hinder this.

We describe an application of such concepts of such tools from Surat’s textile industry, and a proposed architecture for such a tool.

Speaker bio

I did my BTech in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur, started off my grad school at MIT, moved back to India to work at Google, before co-founding a social business on healthcare for the poor (Swasth India). Last few months, I’ve been working on 2 ventures - one a data analytics solutions company for SMEs, and the other - a textile e-commerce company, both in the context of Surat’s textile industry. My learnings / presentation will be based on these learnings.