Effitrac – Coimbatore-based tech company’s simple and cost-effective business management tool for MSME’s
Coimbatore: Logesh Velusamy’s tech company running out of Tidel Park, Coimbatore, Effitrac has released a cost-effective business management tool with the same moniker 'Effitrac for MSME’s'.
Effitrac was bootstrapped with the vision of building a single platform that could offer custom transactional services to MSME businesses of multiple verticals. While Logesh understands many of the challenges MSMEs face, because he is from a MSME background, he also interviewed over 100 MSME owners to understand the various struggles they are facing while running their ventures. Later, Gopinath Nallappan, Co-Founder of Effitrac, found that the problem was interesting to solve and thus joined the journey. Gopinath, his brother Suresh, and Logesh have invested $500,000 to date into the company.
Effitrac focusses on offering end-to-end tech solutions to traditional MSME businesses in India and help small businesses with digital transformation. While speaking to Simplicity, Logesh Velusamy said, “Our goal is to reach 1 million small businesses across India and empower them with smart tools that will have a direct and immediate positive impact on their operating margins. We are in the process of entering into partnerships on the ground to reach out to as many such businesses as possible.”
The company feels that a bit of encouragement from the government’s side would go a long way in easing down the pressure that MSMEs face in running their operations. Logesh says, “As a tech business targeting MSMEs, the support we need from the government is mainly indirect. A conducive business environment where the larger sentiment is positive is what is needed. So policies, stimulus packages and other institutional support to kickstart the economic engine is what we need. The government is already undertaking many such steps and we can see positive reactions on the ground with many of our existing and potential clients expressing a positive outlook towards the future and looking at investing in growth. We would love to be part of any government or industry initiative to provide technology support and tools to small businesses across the country so they can work better and scale up.”
When asked to throw light on the digital solutions/software that the company has adopted recently and how it helped businesses during the pandemic lockdown, Logesh said, “Since we are a technology company offering SaaS tools to small businesses to increase efficiency of all business processes, we had a definite advantage when it came to business continuity during the lockdown. I have always believed that a tech empowered team is a more efficient team and so, even before Covid-19, Effitrac’s team was powered with all the relevant tools for working from home. So, right from day one of the lockdown we were able to render all the services to our customers across the globe from our homes. We use the tools that Effitrac offers to clients in all our business processes and so we are well equipped to support our clients and continue with our regular work from anywhere at any time.”
The company’s primary focus is to empower small businesses with affordable and made-for-small-businesses technology tools that streamline and improve their businesses processes end-to-end. To that end, services are available at a subscription cost as low as less than Rs. 2000 per year. Logesh said, “We realised at the start of the Covid-19 crisis that small businesses will be hurt the most unless steps are taken quickly. So, Effitrac launched industry-specific tools and pre-customised packages meant specifically for MSME businesses.
We see that MSMEs are also highly cognizant of the importance of getting technology onboard and we saw this directly when we had over 250 signups within the first 10 days of the launch of the MSME packages.”
Logesh says that small business owners are not sitting passively, waiting for the crisis to blow over. Instead, they are proactively working to strengthen and improve their business and find new sources of revenue. They have also rightly identified that technology will be a force multiplier for them. He said, “We are seeing immediate impact when clients onboard Effitrac’s tech solutions. For instance, a Coimbatore-based catering company which was primarily an offline business had to shift to online business due to the lockdown. They diversified and ventured into manufacturing sweets and selling them online. They went live with Effitrac and this small, traditional erstwhile catering business is now fully managing ecommerce orders within the Effitrac platform.”
Logesh says that Effitrac can make businesses self-reliant, efficiently function and minimize operational costs to a great extent. He said, “ As a tech founder focused on MSMEs, I am glad that we at Effitrac are creating a positive impact on small business owners and helping them become Atmanirbhar and thrive during this Covid-19 crisis using technology.”