The Success of Subject Matter Experts

SMEs (Subject matter experts) have a critical role to play in generating growth, employment, and solutions for people at the base of the pyramid in emerging economies such as the ecommerce market. They’re also adaptable and agile, more responsive to situations due to their smaller, specialised nature, which allows them to act quickly and flexibly to changing requirements and provide the most suitable solution which helps greatly with the implementation of new technology, increasing it’s time to market significantly. SMEs also face more constraints than large enterprises with a more limited pool of resources.

Partnerships with SMEs are often beneficial, and we prove that at Ayata. For example, AyataCommerce recently helped Emma with the rollout of their new distributed OMS. The OMS (FluentCommerce Order Management) will be rolled out to more than 30 countries, including the USA, UK, China and India. The rollout kickstarted in Colombia in August 2021, just few months after the partnership was formed, and will incrementally cover all current and future markets. Emma aims to complete the rollout in 2022.

Our involvement with Emma Sleep

Emma was experiencing issues with their current software, with their CEO Andreas stating that:
“In this set-up there were a lot of hands involved to implement even simple changes and that prevented us from scaling our organisation. We had more than 30 market teams going through the same bottleneck of software development. That needed to change. Beyond scalability, another issue holding us back from becoming business agile was fragility. The technical debt of the old tech stack became a burden – often up to 30% of development capacity was necessary to fix bugs occurring by unwanted side effects during development. And more than occasionally, the platform would break.”

When asked, how did AyataCommerce enable a seamless implementation during the first phase of the rollout? He replied:

“AyataCommerce supported us to get going with the Fluent Commerce Order Management System and have it swiftly set-up and configured for launching our first two markets, Colombia and Chile, within just a couple of months. They are strong partners of Fluent Commerce and were able to immediately bridge the knowledge gap that occurs when selecting a new, complex system and the need to model business operations into it.”

The time to market of the technology implemented at Emma relative to its scale was extremely fast, particularly by the standards of a larger enterprise.

Read more about the Emma project and our involvement here: