Field Visit Experience @ ESSGI

Infotech

Date: 20-12-1992
Time: 2:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Company Contact: Subrahmanyam Hegde (Owns the company)
FOS Person’s Name: Shamanth Ghatke V

How Abouts of ESSGI

 ESSGI is a 30 year old dealer company founded by Subrahmanyam Hegde selling and buying
various Electronic and IT Hardware products such as laptops, computers, batteries, printers
and scanners etc.
 ESSGI has its own front face customer service centre to address all the customers queries
and concerns and also to resolve all the technical glitches within stipulated SLA metrics.
 As of today, they are considered one of the biggest players by the industry standards and
hold partnerships with various prominent suppliers like Schneider, Canon, Amaron etc.
 I have visited their facility located at Malleshwaram, Bengaluru and interacted with their
team comprised of about 15 people that includes their office and warehouse staff.
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Business Operations

 ESSGI accommodates the complete order lifecycle for a customer right from getting orders,
receiving PO, requesting for payments, delivering goods and finally providing customer
support in their service center whenever required.
 ESSGI has a very strong customer base and 70% of their orders are from existing customers
which works on past relations and mostly happens through phone and email i.e. personal
touch
 To improve their reach and ease their operations, ESSGI has its own ecommerce site called
“estorewale - https://estorewale.com/ ” which acts as their storefront and a medium for
receiving orders
 Once the orders are received, the PO transaction happens via email. They say PO is not
mandatory for every customer (especially for the ones that are loyal and maintained a long
term relationship with the firm) whereas for new customers the PO is mandatory which
happens via email communication
 30% of their payments them happen in COD and this seems to be the standard ratio across
industry. The other mediums of payments are Cheques, Online (NEFT, RTGS etc.)
 For financial accounting and bookkeeping, they use Tally. Though they have an enterprise
software to keep them updated on the books, I have observed that there is a still a lot of
paperwork not integrated with the accounting practices leading to inefficiency in manhours
being spent in reconciling this data into the accounting system .
 For logistics which seems to be a bottleneck at this point, they handle it all by themselves
with vehicles booked from PORTER.in
 The order tracking happens offline through calls and SMS which is a tedious job for them to
address too many customer calls regarding order status, tracking and following up with the
driver to ensure on-time delivery
  The customer support post-delivery happens on-call with the customer. In case of technical
issues, they ask the customer to bring the device to the facility and get it repaired.

My Findings – ESSGI seemed to me like a very well-established SME where a lot of things and
business processes work on trust and customer relation. The workforce seemed to be dedicated.
There are some inefficiencies in the business operations like payments, accounting, delivery
management etc.

About estorewale

Estorewale is a very sophisticated and multi- faceted site which they own. It has all ESSGI products
listed along with multiple high-tech features like search, cart, wish list, product ratings & reviews,
new arrivals section, chatbot and testimonials etc.

It covers the following aspects of Order Lifecycle Management:

a) Selection of the product from catalog

b) Adding the product to the cart
c) Selecting the address and other delivery related details
d) Checkout
e) Payment (Only suitable for Online payment modes)

My Findings:

Serves only people who are tech-savvy and ready to pay online. By introducing this online facility
their business has improved drastically. But it does not cover things like generating PO, order history
tracking etc. The catalog is so far suitable for B2C needs but not B2B.

My purpose of visit
 To validate if the catalog data template for bulk upload is feasible for their business
purposes

Feedback:

 The fields helped them understand the essence of product catalog for B2B interactions.
 The fields like sample availability, certified product, number of pieces in a pack (logistics) are
not applicable in Electronics industry
 MOQ is something not all the players feel important. Only new entrants make it mandatory.
So, it can be an optional field

Data for few of their products in the Bulk Upload template

exemplifies feasibility check

Bulk
Upload_Catalog_Electronics_ESSGI.xlsx
ESSGI’s Pain Points

 Logistics is very tedious; they are losing most of our customers because of it
 ESSGI customers are accumulating their payables which is distorting our working capital
 They are currently using video calling for resolving customer issues which is very gruesome
sometimes
 Logistics costs are worrisome since their customers don’t agree to pay them and even if they
agree they don’t honor the commitment.
 They still have a lot of paperwork in business processes

How can we ‘SOLV’e ESSGIs problems

 We have in–app logistics which will sort out all their problems
 Our payment modes accommodate both online and COD options
 The payments will not be their problem anymore since we will be giving their buyers
business loans and pay later options
 We have PO mandatory option which will improve their business transparency and order
tracking
 We have in-app order tracking page and business ledger to track order/ payments/ account
details
 We have online chat which can help to connect in case of post-delivery customer support
 We can do another level of peel-off to explore their customer support function to enable
resolution to all their issues through our platform with features such as option to track and
monitor the incidents etc.

Business Insights

 Electronics is a low margin industry therefore most of the industry players are price sensitive
 PO is a mandatory document for them but most of their old customers feel lethargic to
compose it
 PO Negotiations are not allowed anywhere in the industry
 In electronics, all the SMEs are be willing to share the video content for their products
 Also, electronics and corresponding devices enlist lots of offers so having a separate section
for the same is really important
 New arrivals are a must component for electronics since most of the devices tend to go for a
tech update/refresh biannually.