More than half of MSEs have not yet digitized processes – 10/15/2023 – Panel SA

More than half of the country’s micro and small companies (MSEs) have not yet digitized their processes and do not even know how to transition to digital transformation.

This is what a survey carried out by DocuSign at the request of Sebrae-SP says and which will be released this Monday (16).

In the study, 96% of MSEs consider that digital transformation is important for their segment and size, however, 53% indicated that the process has not yet been incorporated into the company’s day-to-day operations.

Currently, almost 30% of Brazilian GDP comes from micro and small business activities, according to Sebrae. There are more than 8 million enterprises in this profile and they generate 52% of the country’s jobs.

With many of the internal processes still physical, the trend towards digitalization is one of the challenges for these companies, especially in contract management. Sebrae-SP states that optimizing products and services would improve competitiveness.

“After the pandemic period, digitalization became a path of no return. Today, even if not in a consistent and integrated way, MSEs use digital resources to facilitate their processes and boost their businesses”, says Richard Hudson, vice president of sales from DocuSign.

The survey also found that 10% of the most recent micro and small companies were born with a focus on technology — a reflection of demand during the pandemic period, in which products and services had to be adapted for the remote world.

Although digitalization is progressing little by little among MSEs, entrepreneurs still do not have a plan for adopting new technologies. The challenges range from planning, implementation and budget allocation, to market monitoring and trends to ensure the benefits of digitalization.

Simple processes such as adopting customer relationship management (CRM) tools, planning systems, marketing automation and electronic signatures have not yet been adopted by MSEs.

Contract management, for example, is still done in physical format by more than half of the companies (55%). For Sebrae-SP, this can generate inefficiencies such as delays, problems with renewals, risks of non-compliance and lost opportunities.

Among entrepreneurs who implemented digital contracts (33%), the majority still do not have integrated processes. In these cases, the majority of them stated that text editors are installed on local machines, while only 12% of those interviewed said they use collaborative tools in the cloud.

To obtain the results, DocuSign collected data from 1,061 entrepreneurs who are Sebrae-SP customers in all regions of the country.

With Diego Felix

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