SME Times News Bureau | 27 Apr, 2021
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.
Please
detail about the flexible pricing/subscription plans and ROI it offers
customers.
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.
Please tell our readers about future
plans of AAHAA?
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.