Retail, distribution, and hospitality business owners looking to bolster operations and improve profit margins now require efficient tech-driven management platforms that provide a clear view of all their business operations to make appropriate and timely decisions. However, most IT solutions’ high costs and rigid nature always dampen these aspirations.
According to Lanre Olaniyan, the CEO of SoftStructures Limited, an IT firm driving innovation across Africa and whose team recently developed a new management solution called NeüRMS, currently, most software available to retail businesses in Nigeria is not suited for the country.
He said, “Some of the most critical features that apply to our business environment are unavailable or unaffordable. Sometimes, the software packages need help understanding your stock. Some solutions are not intelligent, and users have to input many entries manually. For example, they have limited live carts and cannot attend to multiple customers.
“What you now see is that despite the huge amounts spent on these retail management solutions, businesses still revert to Excel spreadsheets or other old computer-based tools to run their operations. However, they eventually discovered these methods are too time-consuming, prone to errors, exposes them to theft and manipulations or point-blank too expensive or overly complex for SMEs to afford.”
Having identified these existing problems and critical business challenges, NeüRMS was developed by SoftStructures Limited, a wholly Nigerian tech solutions firm, to provide cost-effective and sustainable solutions for businesses to enable them to maximize their potential.
Recently launched in Lagos, NeüRMS is already adopted by business owners across different sectors, including online and social media-based merchants seeking safer and quicker ways to sell and meet customers’ needs respectively. It is fast emerging as a preferred solution because payment can be made in our local currency, saving them the cost of paying in USD or other foreign currencies.
NeüRMS is a secure, subscription-based, and easy-to-use integrated retail management solution that reduces the mundane workload of running a retail, distribution, or hospitality business. It automates and simplifies operations and allows entrepreneurs to focus on what matters.
The revolutionary solution developed due to years of deliberate and in-depth analysis of the Nigerian SME sector and its challenges intends to drastically improve how businesses conduct their operations and administer control over their resources through cloud-based technology.
NeüRMS Point of Sale feature enables users to perform various retail functions such as product scanning during sales, receipt issuance, payment processing, and even loyalty and discount administration on a single-page application available on all digital platforms terminals. The feature can move any SME from manual to digital in minutes, catapulting it into the world of e-commerce, thus improving its customer reach and profitability.
Operating in a low-trust economy where unpleasant stories are quite common in customer relationships, employee-employer disputes, and more, the NeüRMS solution helps business owners block leakages, curb theft and instill better accountability across different business units, like accounts, warehouses, retail managers, cashiers, etc.
The Chief Technology Officer, Emmanuel Moses, explains that SoftStructures Limited has its core values vested in ensuring that global best practices are adhered to and adopted at all levels of its operations. So, much effort went into ensuring that NeüRMS can always safeguard its users’ security and data privacy.
He also explains how the product was designed to solve many problems or concerns. First, the assurance that once signed up, the solution is accessible, operates smoothly on all existing computers and mobile devices, and complies with different operating environments, including IOS, Android, Windows, and Web OS.
Second, is the free webpage that comes with the package, which guarantees increased online visibility for its customers and helps them to start exploiting the benefits of e-commerce. At the same time, the company offers round-the-clock customer support to users to ensure a seamless and cost-efficient experience.
According to the team, the journey started in 2020, during the global Covid-19 crisis, when the world learned big lessons about embracing easy-to-use modern virtual tools as the new human default. Therefore, NeüRMS is big on remote tools that ensure business owners, big or small, can run their stores and outlets simultaneously from any location without losing control.
The software’s innovative supply chain management feature allows business owners to track inventory levels, request vendor supply, monitor and negotiate price changes, schedule deliveries, and so much more in real-time, all in one user-friendly digital platform.
As a business growth enabler, the report and analytics feature provides valuable insights into sales information, purchase order status, credit terms, stock availability, and invoice status for implementing appropriate business decisions and strategies.
Over the years, Nigeria’s SME sector has become one of the pillars of the nation’s economy and an essential contributor to economic growth. The industry contributes 48% of the national GDP, 96% of businesses, and 84% of employment. In plain terms, Nigeria’s SMEs are thriving and can even scale up to become market leaders in various sectors of the Nigerian and African economies.
These businesses’ forecasted growth and expansion require adopting more conventional management and administrative approaches for running day-to-day operations and ensuring maximized return on investment, which is different from the simple methods previously adopted to get by.
NeüRMS is undoubtedly a disruptive solution set to transform how Nigerian SMEs in the retail, distribution and hospitality sectors are run by granting them access to affordable, user-friendly, subscription-based solutions that, until now, were only available to large enterprises. Entrepreneurs must decide to be part of this future or be left behind.
Nairametrics
