It has been not even two years and I can taste success every second as I can see my start up growing at faster pace everyday. I personally want to share how I grew so fast even without any external funding or any special rocket science.
We at Simbacart are always focused on working with minimum possible team members , hence giving all attention to IT and improving it with daily new
scenarios. It is a proud moment for my team , when we see that we have mapped our business model with our in house ERP system , covering majority of scenarios.
Whenever I feel like hiring more staff , I Â try to improve on my IT more and I look for more automation in system in order to reduce human intervention thereby reducing operational cost.
Simbacart's cloud based ERP system has been developed on open source technologies (Java/J2EE Stack) , saving huge licensing cost. It supports hierarchy of organisations , helping Simbacart to operate at multiple locations in the form of Parent and Child companies. It has been build on Industry Standard Data Model  - For eg : we do not have customers/ suppliers / employees as separate entities we have party ids for each entity , hence playing multiple role in the organisation.
We have a matured cataloging system.We have one click automation for uploading our product catalogs from excels and images from the folders. Accounting has been the most critical part , has been improved with time and has been achieved recently in our systems , hence reducing effort of my accountant to do multiple entries in Tally or excels and do tedious reconciliations manually. The system is mature enough to present real time sales figures and helping us to access data anytime anywhere. Sales force automation helps us to keep track of leads generated by sales team and keep track of the sales team in terms of offline business done by Simbacart .
The logistics is the second critical area after accounting in order to be mapped correctly with real time transactions. Our system supports multiple warehouses and sub warehouses (parent and child facilities). We have established a central warehouse which supports various sub warehouses further. Sub warehouses includes Simbacart's warehouse , warehouse for offline sales , Multiple warehouses for online channels. We have integrated our systems via API directly with logistics companies , hence updating our system in terms of automated courier status tracking everyday by running multiple batch jobs. We have been continuously working  achieving minimum time to pack one order and mark it complete in system. Hence we do continuous experiments on how to reduce on time by doing more automation. With a team of mere 3 we are able to process 300+ orders each day. All credit goes to our in house IT.
In terms of customer relationship management we have facility of sending mass emails by opting customer filtration options in terms of location , ticket size , date filtration or type of product customer has bought from us. We have customized a chat messenger  with queue facility available for customers.Reconciliations & reporting are part of every organisation , which needs daily attention. Simbacart has been able to set standards in terms of all possible  automated smart alerts  to keep team active all the time with enough insights of the real time business. System it self keeps us bound in terms of timely tasks to be done For example : Once we get order on our panel it has to be packed within 20 minutes or system will send an alert to team that process has been breached. System intelligently sends reports as configured example daily sales report , the delay shipment reports , the unpaid invoices report , Shipment tracking report, orders in process report- all are sent to the departments everyday.
We have successfully launched seller panel for sellers (seller.simbacart.com) , which is a recent achievement in our basket allowing sellers to update their data themselves on our website without messy excel sheets. Though in  India Third party integration are messy majority of the times , Still we have been able to integrate our systems with logistics partners and online channels to the extent they have been able to provide us correct data. Simbacart has matured Content management system , uploading front-end and backend data within seconds. We have a complete asset management system keeping track of all assets of the company and hence maintaining record of it. In Human resource , In addition to basic employee record maintenance module ,  we have internal chat facility for our employees and core team remotely working with us from various locations.Â
Project Management has been important part at simbacart. We create various projects in system and define further tasks under them mentioning deadlines and track using a single panel. It also sends smart alerts to the assigner and executor. We have also developed Internal Mobile apps to strengthen our operations reducing human interventions and save time. For example : we have developed mobile app for capturing shipment and manifest data , reducing our time from 4-5 hours to just 30 minutes.Â
Over the time I have realized the importance of having strong in-house IT support , as it has opened vast number of business opportunities for Simbacart to scale up faster managing thousands of orders with a small team. The basic funda we work on is to continuously strive for identifying automation opportunities to reduce any manual efforts/errors thereby leveraging the system to its full potential resulting into reducing cost as well. With time we have built the base so strong in terms of IT that it always give me clear indication of smooth scaling up and makes me feel
"I have a strong asset"Â
With my sincere efforts!
Mandeep