How are supply chain based companies creating new age customer experiences with GOFRUGAL?

2020 threw many challenges at retailers, restaurants and supply chain companies. Some companies in these sectors that had a strong technology backbone, made significant efforts to improve their business resilience. Some even pivoted their business models, accelerating their online presence to cater to the new normal. Indian businesses in these sectors are aggressively looking to manage their business more efficiently. They are making smarter and timely decisions on the move. Further, they aim to improve customer delight with a seamless omni-channel experience. Helping these organizations get their digital groove right, are digital innovators like Chennai-based GOFRUGAL technologies, who offer an 'Easy Suite' of digital, easy-to-use services.

Read the success story of GOFRUGAL from its Chief Technology Officer, Santhana Gopalan R.

Tell us about the genesis of GOFRUGAL.

GOFRUGAL was established in 2004, with a vision to empower retail businesses with effective and efficient technology solutions. We were the first to provide complete retail business management software offering 100% automation, 100% transparency on pricing and policy, security with an audit trail on all operations since the year of our inception.

Can you give us a broad overview of your business model and the USP of your solution?

We are a digital-first company, offering cloud and mobile ERP solutions to Retail, Restaurant and Distribution businesses. To stay competitive in a dynamic market, we help customers embrace agility and transform digitally. Thus, they can grow their business with less staff and minimal skills, benefiting from our 100% accurate and reliable solutions.

We offer a complete billing to balance sheet ERP solution, scalable to meet the needs of any business. This way, we also cover a wide spectrum of organizations - from small, independent stores, regional and national chains and large enterprises. Customers are citing the comprehensiveness of our ERP solution - with seamless integrations to third-party aggregators, easy invoicing and filing of tax returns, easy onboarding - as a key reason to switch to our solution easily.

Our customers tell us that their teams include school dropouts, emphasizing the need for easy-to-use software solutions. So we have made our solution highly intuitive - it’s easy to learn and simple to use - to minimize training needs at our customers’ end. Further, recognizing the value of time for our customers, we have brought down the implementation time of our solution to less than 9 hours. In some cases, depending on the size of the business, we have brought this down further to under 4 hours.

Such measures have given our customers huge confidence to adopt and benefit from our solutions.

How are you helping your end customers?

Our products and solutions help businesses delight their customers by moving them from transactional to experiential shopping, manage them efficiently, connect and collaborate with their stakeholders and most importantly make timely decisions on the move. Most businesses in our industry are hesitant to explore and upgrade to modern technology: either because it is difficult to migrate to a new system or harder requiring a lot of time, money, and efforts. This is where our expertise comes in. We help them manage this change easily, in small incremental steps, in an agile way, with less time and efforts; most importantly without leading to any disruption to their business.

We enable customers with capabilities to generate Smart Reports and exhaustive reports with built-in business intelligence help in accurate data-driven decisions, faster inventory turns and greater profits. Our products are getting smarter with the addition of IoT, AI/ML and NLP. We provide 24x7 responsive assured care with IoT & AI for personalized service. Our customers enjoy the freedom of support by choosing the channel of their choice for self-service - chat or voice support. All the needs of customers - from support, ticket tracking, feedback, new releases/features, launches, additional services and any of their go-to-needs from GOFRUGAL is made easy with the one of its kind myGofrugal App.

What challenges were you facing in your business before using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)?

With OCI, our customers have gained a more flexible, scalable and sustainable cloud platform. Further, they are reporting much better application performance and superior cloud economics, with 50% lesser spending.

How have you benefited from the strategic partnership with Oracle?

With this strategic partnership, we can co-sell our solutions for enterprises across geographies. This will accelerate the decision-making and reduce the implementation time. A win-win-win business model in which our customers, Oracle, and we benefit from the partnership.

Tell us about your expansion and growth strategy.

We are growing our customers across 70+ countries with more than 1000+ partners across the world. We continue to invest in R&D and enhance our product and solutions by aligning them to the market needs. Thus, our customers enjoy the lowest total cost of ownership with our solutions. We plan to grow 100% y-o-y over the next few years.

We serve customers in both established and growth markets like India, Africa, Middle East and South Asia. This year we are planning to strengthen our footprint in countries like South Africa, Saudi Arabia and also South Asian markets like Singapore, Maldives, Thailand and Cambodia. We also plan to venture into new markets like North America/Europe and Oceanic countries like Australia, New Zealand in the next 12-24 months.

Briefly touch upon your innovation roadmap. What new emerging technologies are you planning to use in 2021 and beyond?

We are designing a new generation of digital-native solutions with a focus on customer experience at the centre. Further, we are working on adding new solutions like ‘endless-isle’, Kiosks Apps, Contact-less QR code digital menu and ordering for Restaurants, complete automation with mobile apps from stock-taking, GRN, refill, audit etc.

Now, we are enhancing our solutions to provide insights on data with IoT, AI and ML technologies for auto-reordering and automating stock-taking/refill efforts. We are shortly launching a Gofrugal developer platform with open APIs where anyone can integrate and use our solutions. We want to give businesses the freedom to innovate, bring ideas faster to production.