The Essence Of Buana Solutions Advancing MSMEs With Digitalization

Illustration (Photo: Doc. Antara)

JAKARTA - In order to welcome National MSME Day, PT Esensi Solusi Buana (ESB), launched an integrated campaign titled Entrepreneur Mutual Assistance to continue to support the optimization of the potential of national culinary MSMEs.

Currently, the government sees MSMEs as one of the most important pillars in the Indonesian economy.

Quoted from data from the Ministry of Cooperatives and SMEs (August, 2022), the number of MSMEs currently reaches 64.2 million with a contribution to GDP of 61.07 percent or Rp. 8,573.89 trillion.

The contribution of MSMEs to the Indonesian economy includes the ability to absorb 97 percent of the total workforce and can collect up to 60.4 percent of the total investment.

The high number of MSMEs in Indonesia is also inseparable from the existing challenges. One of them is the pandemic where Bank Indonesia recorded that as many as 87.5 percent of MSMEs were affected by the Covid-19 pandemic. Of this amount, around 93.2 percent were negatively affected on the sales side.

While on the other hand, the pandemic has also driven the acceleration of digital transformation, the influence of changes in consumer behavior from offline to online.

The digitization of MSME actors has proven to be able to increase the empowerment of MSME capacity in the country, therefore the government has launched a digitalization program with a target of 30 million MSME actors entering the digital ecosystem by 2024.

ESB CEO and Founder Gunawan Woen said, digital disruption has opened access for many MSMEs to the level of traditional stalls.

"That is why ESB sees that every culinary MSME has enormous potential. Culinary business owners can get many benefits and increase competitiveness if they are open to digitalization," said Gunawan.

"The ESB ecosystem provides a solution for its users to reach their optimal potential because they can focus fully on business and product development without being confused with day-to-day operational controls such as cashiers, records, financial reports, ordering, and so on," he continued.

To support the government's program for digitizing MSMEs, said Gunawan, ESB created a special campaign for Culinary MSMEs in Indonesia, namely Entrepreneurs Helping Each Other.

"From the very beginning, ESB has focused on developing F&B business management technology, which has now become an upstream to downstream ecosystem," he added.

The programs in this Mutual Assistance Entrepreneur campaign include inviting fellow culinary entrepreneurs and social media influencers to collaborate and help each other in business promotion to the #CurhatUMKM podcast for culinary business owners to share stories encouraging each other.

“Efficiency is important for every business. Through detailed financial reports, entrepreneurs can see the 3 biggest burdens on their business processes so they can focus on reducing costs," Gunawan continued.

He added that the biggest burden in the first F&B business was food costs. Meanwhile, the second biggest burden is employee cost.

Therefore, the efficiency of the number of employees can result in even more savings. The third biggest expense is location cost.

"If the location is still rented, then entrepreneurs must be able to take full advantage of the rental location to fill idle capacity. In this way, profits will increase approximately 2 or 3 times," said Gunawan.

Supporting this campaign, ESB introduced a superior product for Culinary MSMEs, ESB POSlite.

The features possessed by ESB POSlite provide many solutions for cost efficiency in terms of operations and food ingredients, then access to ordering or booking, funding, comprehensive reporting and monitoring, to growing engagement with consumers for rewards plans for loyal consumers.

ESB POSlite was developed specifically for the Culinary MSME business, with so many features that provide convenience to business owners such as:

1. Digital Cashier that can be operated via a personal smartphone or tablet, which can be used even offline.

2. Complete transaction reports, daily, weekly, monthly and yearly.

3. Integration with QRis, e-Wallet, credit and debit card payment methods.

4. Quick Service Mode - Control panel for online orders starting from delivery, dine-in, and take away.

5. Affordable fees starting from IDR 2,000 per day per outlet.