Your SME reimagine: technology as an enable of the digital transformation of SMEs to successfully boost your reinvention for the future

During the Covid-19 Pandemia, small and medium-sized companies have been the most affected, and they battle daily to survive, adapt and reimagine their businesses.Remote work, changing the way they do business, adoption of new technologies and redefine sales and commercial practices have been the main pillars for change in SMEs in the last year.

According to a study, 83% of SMEs have declared that they have made changes in their organizations after pandemic and even more, 72% of these declare that their ability to adapt to the new normality has been and will be their greatest challenge in2021.

Face challenges to survive and reinvent your business, and find opportunities to succeed and keep them in the long term, are two scenarios that are presented to SMEs today, and in the middle there is digital transformation as a enabling, as a partner.But digital transformation goes beyond innovation, today, it is a requirement for continuity and future of business.

SMEs are the engine of growth and development in the economy in Latin America and its digital transformation goes beyond a simple transformation, it is also to improve agility, marketing speed and stability, it is about reinventing itself successfully for the future.To help them on their day of adaptation, transformation and reinvention of their business, Microsoft created your SME reimagine, an event planned to travel the foundations for the reimagination of SMEs.

Diego Bekerman, general manager for small, medium and corporate customers in Microsoft Latin America, began the event to talk about how some SMEs adapted to advance during pandemic and how technology accelerated the change towards a digital world, both for those they foundmore challenges as for those who found opportunities.This technology, as an enabler, brings with it rapid improvements in processes and products and also allows SMEs to adapt, add value and get success.

According to Diego Bekerman, there are more than 16 million SMEs in Latin America, which represent more than 99% of organizations in the market.These contribute 22% to GDP and 61% to the use of the region.These figures clearly show that SMEs are the growth engine and the development of our economy, and when they are set in motion, a chain of positive events that lead our region to success begins.

SME priorities

Reimagina tu PYME: La tecnología como habilitador de la transformación digital de las PyMEs para impulsar con éxito su reinvención para el futuro

At present, SMEs need to take 5 priorities for their digital transformation day and Microsoft has solutions that can help them reinvent themselves for the future.Roberto Icasuriaga, director of SMEs and digital companies in Microsoft Latin America, developed those 5 priorities that are: develop new skills to grow, enable remote work, ensure the privacy of data and business safety, improve performance, and reduceCosts.

Develop new skills to grow

Microsoft has built a culture of "secreting everything", which seeks to embrace curiosity, focus on ingenuity and take what has been learned to apply it in future success.With this in mind, it has the objective of helping technology education even more accessible to all who want to acquire new skills, pursue a professional career and keep up to date in the latest technological advances.People, and companies of all sizes and industries now have access to training and content of business experts such as MS Learn, AI Business School, Cloud Skills Challenge, LinkedIn Learn.

Enable remote work

So that SMEs can continue at the service of their customers, launch new businesses, meet with employees and keep their company in operation, Microsoft Teams allows them to perform many of their tasks remotely.They can chat, collaborate, gather and use Microsoft Office applications integrated, so as not to interrupt the work flow.

Also, they can use Viva Insights, which is part of Microsoft 365, to have value information about how each member of the company uses their time and provides recommendations to be more effective, such as the time that is spent in meetings,number of emails received and sent, with which network of contacts we work frequently, among others.

Other solutions that help the virtualization process be more efficient are Microsoft Bookings, which allows you to program online appointments to provide better customer service, save time and manage appointments from anywhere;and Microsoft Forms, a simple application to create surveys and questionnaires, which can be used to collect comments from customers or equipment about new products or get the pulse of the audience in a matter of minutes.

Ensure data privacy and business safety

Since the pandemic began, cyber attacks have been quintupled and SMEs require access to their business to their collaborators quickly, safely and economically.An option for this is Microsoft Defender for Office 365, which protects with email and protects ties or malicious files in other tools such as Microsoft Teams, OneDrive or SharePoint.

There are other tools such as Microsoft 365 Business Premium, which with its cloud platform simplifies the implementation and protects identity, data and devices with IT tools to protect remote work, such as conditional access, Microsoft Intune, Azure Active Directory,Protection against advanced threats and more.And Windows Virtual Desktop, for a scalable desktop and an applications virtualization experience with multiple sessions in Windows 10.

Improve business performance

To improve business performance, SMEs require an integral administration of business systems and processes.Microsoft Business Central allows sales equipment, services, finance and operations to meet in a single administration solution of the cloud company.

Through Power Platform, SMEs can automat.In addition, through its low code products such as Power Apps, Power Bi and Power Virtual Agents, Microsoft Power Platform gathers intelligent process automation.

Reduce costs

The cloud offers great value not only for its ease of use and subscription options to choose the one that best suits the business needs, now also offers automatic updates that ensure that users always have the most recent and safe software.

The acquisition of technology as a service allows any SME to access the same solutions to which a large company has access, without the need for a strong money investment and with the advantage of paying only for what is used.Microsoft Azure, Microsoft's cloud solution, offers infrastructure migration to the cloud, with Windows Server servers in Azure and the database, SQL Server in Azure, as well as easy development and implementation applications for SMEs.

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