Sustainability is a process of evolution, not revolution!

BANGALORE, INDIA: As a key component of economy, SMBs are the main drivers of economic growth and are emerging fast, throughout the globe. Over the last decade, leading companies have recognized that systemic sustainability transforms to successful business performance.

Sustainability means businesses becoming more involved in their local communities and setting long-term goals that go beyond their results. One of the brighter side of SMBs is being labor intensive and opportunity driven platform. SMBs are potentially bright for innovation and sustainable initiatives due to their flexibility and risk-taking ability.

On a broader perspective, the SMBs in India consist not just factory enterprises but a considerable number of predominantly rural based, unorganized manufacturing enterprises. Modern SMEs, which are run by innovative techno-entrepreneurs and which are operating in new sectors, will be able to perceive and pursue the opportunities offered by globalization appropriately and therefore, prosper rapidly. But a major portion of SMBs in India still operate with obsolete technology.

SMBs should be mainly educated with advancement of technology and up-gradation of their business processes, systems. SMBs in India, should get used to internet marketing in order to scale up their reach and increase networking, amongst clients. Rather than a mere option, it's a must these days, since SMBs can use internet applications for marketing or any other business function, for free.

SMBs should have the anticipation towards development and their requirements or else they push themselves towards the risk factor. Being involved in the local community may prove a sustainability technique for SMBs. There can be no doubt that sustainability has become an important priority for many businesses.

To know how important sustainability is to the SMBs, one need to look only at how their customers are changing their attitudes and emphasize on their business practices.

Satya Prabhakar, Founder & CEO, Sulekha.com said, "Given the macroeconomic issues that an SMB faces today, every single customer has become even more precious than in the past. Sulekha.com has been one of the most dependable source for lead generation. Any visitor on Sulekha.com searching for a particular service, is mapped to a specific SMB offering this service using its proprietary algorithms. This information is passed within seconds to the SMB with the exact user requirements, following which the SMB calls up the user and converts them to a customer. Accuracy of customer requirement and speed with which it reaches the SMB are the key sustainable factor for SMB's."

There are different elements for sustainability which SMBs need to know, they are:

a) Strategy and planning - Finding innovative ways in which the enterprise can be a good corporate to the benefit of employees, customers and suppliers will yield benefits to your business. Defining in detail what sustainability means to your enterprise, can clear the definition to everyone in the enterprise about the success measures and it's practices.

b) Execution - Implementation of any strategy is easy, but sustaining and making it successful in an enterprise is not a cake walk. Responsibilities have to be taken and working towards them gives more clarity of who is in charge of what. Communicating widely is one of the most important aspect for sustainability in every business enterprise.

c) Performance and results - Sometimes sustainable means being efficient. Making the most of it and working consistently in every aspect of the business processes. Keeping an eye on the optimized consumption of energy and wastage production, would certainly support efficiency. In simple, it outcomes with improved profits within your business.

Vikas Bhonsle, GM, Mid-market, Dell India said, "One of the core requirements of a small and medium businesses (SMBs) is to be well equipped with IT solutions that will help them innovate as well increase their productivity. These applications should be a good combination of hardware and software solutions like servers, storage, networking equipment that are prepared to deal with the pressure of the increased workloads."

"For SMBs, the workload impact is especially critical as they strive to make the most out of existing hardware and resources they have today while ensuring their IT environment is flexible enough to meet tomorrow's unknown needs and challenges. Dell is optimally positioned to serve the SMB segment as we have designed our products and solutions with the aforesaid design principles in mind - that enable our consumers to be flexible and scalable during uncertain times," he also added.