KUALA LUMPUR: Homegrown retail solutions providers Innergia Labs Sdn Bhd is helping small and medium enterprises (SME) address retail pain points (RPP), which if it is left unchecked, will result in loss of profit.
This is particularly important given that about 98 per cent of the Malaysian commerce landscape, hence a huge chunk of the economy, is generated by the SMEs.
In an interview with NST Business, Innergia chief executive officer and co-founder Vernon Chua explained that a very common issue affecting the retail industry was the lack of concrete and systematic business intelligence.
“Collection of data is often done manually and it becomes more complicated if a business owner operates multiple outlets. This contributes to a lack of consistent data collection and easy to understand information to assist in their decision making,” he said.
The lack of data, according to Chua, led to shrinkage and pilferage.
“It doesn’t sound good but often times, it is the staff of the company who is stealing from the company by duplicating receipts and pocketing the difference. Replicated over time, this will mean a huge loss to a business.”
As all tech start-ups, Innergia has undergone its pre-series funding round A valued at RM1.8 million as of December 2017.
It also received Cradle Fund Sdn Bhd (Cradle)’s Cradle Investment Programme 300 (CIP300) grant.
The CIP300 is a pre-commercialisation programme which provides financial and value added assistance up to RM300,000 for entrepreneurs to kick-start innovative technology based business ventures.
Incorporated under the Ministry of Finance, Cradle is Malaysia’s early stage start-up influencer and has helped fund over 900 Malaysian tech start-ups.
It is with these fundings that Innergia created the Systematic Collection and Analysis of Retail Data (SYCARDA), which automatically collects sales data by tracking every transaction as it happens and from each point-of-sale (POS).
The data is then transferred to the cloud for analysis where users can login to the user-friendly SYCARDA web portal to keep track of their real-time business analytics such as sales patterns and performances across all the stores where SYCARDA is installed.
SYCARDA is also able to detect and flag any suspicious transactions, allowing its clients to track and investigate the activity immediately.
“SYCARDA works on top of a retailer’s existing POS infrastructure, so they do not need to spend large amounts on new hardware or software. It can also be adopted across different retail sectors and formats such as supermarkets, health and beauty, pharmacies and other retail businesses that operate with a POS,” explained Chua.
“It also boast a simple plug-and-play architecture that retailers can easily deploy and extend across multiple sites and even chains as they scale up their businesses and with minimum disruption to their operations.”
Some 200 SMEs had subscribed to SYCADA as of October 2018.
Chua explained that although SMEs were the target for the firm for SYCARDA subscription, the program could also be tweaked to suit any businesses, whatever the size.
“Ultimately, we are are homegrown Malaysian talent and we don’t have to consult any head offices in a different country for us to tweak the program. We are always innovating to suit our customers needs,” he said.