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Kuala Lumpur: The majority of local Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) have been losing up to five per cent of their business revenue annually as they are still not adopting big data automation in their business, says an expert.Founder of the Centre of Applied Data Science (Cads) Sharala Axryd said this scenario, if not changed in the near term, would result in these SMEs not being able to survive in the long run and eventually having to shut down their businesses.

"There is a very low awareness of the importance of digitalisation in data management among the majority of SMEs currently. They probably have not realised that as the world moves towards digitisation, they have to move too if they want to survive.

"They cannot stick to the traditional ways of doing business which include manual data management processes because there would be a lot of human errors that would result in revenue leakages," she told reporters after Cads' Breakfast Forum – Embracing Big Data to Plug Revenu Leakages in SMEs here Wednesday.

Often going unnoticed, revenue leakage can significantly impact organisations, especially growing businesses such as SMEs, in terms of significantly losing revenue, recording lower wins or even overpaying their clients, she noted.

Cads, a one-stop platform and centre of excellence for data science in Malaysia and across the Asean region, believes that these revenue leakages can be detected, repaired and recovered, thus avoiding future leaks, using specialised and ultimately effective approaches.

Axryd said revenue leakage is a complex business challenge involving numerous internal stakeholders, various operational disciplines and functional experts.

"Our data scientists are capable of helping dynamic and growing businesses across multiple sectors and industries by identifying and implementing appropriate strategies, embedding effective controls, policies and specialist capabilities to provide tangible business value.

"Beyond this, we want to highlight the true underlying causes of revenue leakage and provide guidance on what action is really needed to mitigate and prevent the leakage moving forward," she added.

The two-hour forum is the first in a series of sessions to be organised by Cads to engage with Malaysian businesses and champion the relevance of data science in an organisation.

"Data science can add value to any business who can use their data well. Our aim is to work with organisations in Malaysia to power their business value and help them realise that no organisation is too small to be data-savvy," she said. – Bernama