In an exclusive interview with SME Times, Founder & Chairman, aahaa technologies, Asokan Sattanathan, said that small and meium sized firms will find its product DigiSell immensely beneficial.

Excerpts of the interview…

Please tell our readers about aahaa technologies and its entrepreneurial journey.
Founded in 2013, aahaa technologies offers distinct technology-enabled platforms in the supply chain domain to businesses across verticals who are keen to digitally transform their operations. They cover both inbound and outbound processes, leading to superior automation, analytics, goal congruence, control and governance. The organization helps large and mid-market companies globally sell their products using DigiSell – an omni-channel ordering platform and save on purchases using DigiProcure – an intelligent procurement platform.

DigiProcure and DigiSell are products built on state-of-the-art technology tools, offered as SaaS on cloud, and are designed to transform business processes for collaborative engagement of all stakeholders. It has served over 150 corporates across diverse categories and has pivoted in 2020 from a warehousing and distribution operation to a pure SaaS play. The organization has been funded by YourNest Venture Capital and Calega and has been awarded several awards like NASSCOM, CIO Review among many others.

Founder of aahaa technologies, Asokan Sattanathan, was earlier with Bharti Airtel as the Executive Director Supply Chain and was also one of its Board members. He was responsible for transforming Bharti Airtel’s commercial buying unit into a full-fledged global supply chain organization.

Please tell about your latest product DigiSell and how it can help SMEs.

Digisell is an omni-channel platform that helps large and mid-market firms to sell their products globally. This self-service portal enables SMEs to create their own e-retail store. With this ecommerce enablement, they can receive and process orders from B2B/B2B2B/D2C sector with full control and customised configurations such as Dynamic B2B pricing, Contracts, Catalogue Creation, Ordering, Tracking, Inventory and Stock Management.

DigiSell is implemented in a flexible and short timeline – based on the plan and use case. It can be activated by a user within a single day. With B2B at its core, all complex B2B ordering is transformed into simple B2C e-commerce operation.

Which are the industries that this product is catering to with positive impact and how?

DigiSell caters to multiple sectors including healthcare, food & agriculture, machinery, machine parts, packaging material, industrial products, electrical appliances, clothing & construction material. In short, any SME with a physical presence and distributed sales operations will find Digisell immensely advantageous. Small and medium organisations can launch their products on this e-commerce site by uploading multiple reference images, specifications and descriptions and B2B pricing. They can even add customers to specific catalogues by getting them registered. These registered customers can order anytime from anywhere, via any internet browser and through WhatsApp as well. The organisations selling on this platform will not miss a single order and can accept them and update their shipment details to customers in real-time. Additionally, DigiSell offers several integrated payment methods which can be chosen by the sellers. Besides the already mentioned features, DigiSell provides system-generated analytics which assist in better decision making by the e-sellers.

What is the importance of privacy and security it offers to these businesses?

Privacy and security of the businesses is of utmost importance. The digital gateway gives complete data security and availability at all times. All traffic to edge servers is screened by a world-class firewall before allowing it to the edge, but without compromising performance.

This omni-channel website is built on multi-tenant architecture. Every customer’s data is logically separated with a unique tenant Id to ensure that a customer’s data cannot be accessed by any other individual. All data at rest is encrypted using AES-256-bit standards with the keys being managed by AWS Key Management Service. The entire data in transit is encrypted using FIPS-140-2 standard encryption algorithm.

DigiSell comes with different subscription plans and is carefully crafted for companies to scale. DigiSell's ultimate aim is to increase the revenue of an SME. Hence, the cost of owning the e-commerce store will decrease drastically as the revenue increases.

What is the technology behind Digisell that makes all the above and more possible on the platform?

The effortless on-boarding only requires the sellers’ contact details and store name to sign up to the platform for free. After activating the store, they can start selling online by creating a catalogue. Also, there is no requirement of manual validation on contract prices.

DigiSell takes care of mundane tasks that a sales/operations team does on validating a purchase order by receiving orders online. The data of all the clients and customers is encrypted using FIPS-140-2 standard encryption algorithm.

The intention is to play a pivotal role in accelerating the digital transformation of India’s SMEs who are currently struggling with offline processes that consume precious manpower. Created in India but usable anywhere in the world, DigiSell will continue to expand its range of offerings and connect businesses with their customers efficiently and seamlessly.