Born in Montevideo, she is 38 years old and has a degree in Business Management and Administration. After years of experience in the consulting firm Nielsen, since October she has been the general manager of Scanntech, a Uruguayan company specialised in technological solutions for retailers (especially warehouses) that even plans to reach the Asian market.
Its services are aimed at improving the management of points of sale and linking them with suppliers and service companies. The company has already reached 4,900 retail checkouts in Uruguay and expects to capture 3,000 more this year. It is also investing heavily in Brazil, with a web platform that brings promotions from different suppliers to the trade. Bustamante is married, has two daughters and in her spare time she enjoys playing sports.
You worked for several years at the consulting firm Nielsen, how did you get involved with Scanntech?
I had a boss at Nielsen who went to work for Scanntech Argentina. From there I started to learn more about the company. Three years ago, an opportunity arose as commercial director of mass consumption for Uruguay, linked to working with mass consumption suppliers, and I had a strong link within Nielsen. It is a department in which I interacted with all areas of the company. From there, relatively recently, the general management was created.
What can we expect from this new phase with you at the helm of Scanntech?
The heart of this company is to help in the management of the retail trade. We provide a solution so that independent supermarkets and, above all, the grocery channel can have state-of-the-art technology, which at the time was only available to the large chains. The idea is to always work in an integrated way with the suppliers to give the possibility to make promotions in these points of sale, that perhaps if they could not measure the result of the action they would not be able to implement it. We provide the knowledge of the results of the actions and we can generate differences between those points of sale that have Scanntech and those that do not. We always say: where is the consumer going to go to buy: the store that has the offers or the one that doesn't?
How are results measured?
For example, we recently had FNC promotions, three Stella Artois at $250. Because we know how many promotional transactions were generated at the point of sale, we know how much was sold, how much discount was given, and how many sales units the supplier has to replenish the retailer to effectively pay for those units that were sold under promotion. This provides traceability to effectively know the impact of the promotion at the point of sale.
Your flagship product is the iPos, what features does it have?
Apart from offering the possibility of paying with all credit cards, it includes services that attract more customers to the points of sale and therefore generate more sales for the retailer. We have mobile phone recharging, payment of vehicle licenses (Sucive), parking fees, DirecTV, UTE, Antel and soon OSE bills. It also allows Pronto! loans, internet purchases with PaySafeCard and we operate with mobile phone top-ups from Argentina.
Internally, in what ways can the system help to better understand the business?
We are a solution to manage the point of sale. We offer the retailer a reporting system, where they can perfectly control their sales, their stock. There are more than 100 preset in the system to help in the management of the business for each retailer. Apart from the ones we already have, we can make customised reports for each point of sale, depending on their needs.
What kind of information do these 100 reports provide?
Sales, stock, purchases, prices, analysis by family, inventory (which is so important for the point of sale), cash closing controls, zeta or equis controls. It is a series of functionalities.
How does Scanntech, a Uruguayan company, position itself against other major players in the international market?
The key is that we are a platform that integrates the retailer with the service companies and the suppliers so that the retail channel has the greatest benefit. We developed a web-based platform, called e-marketplace, where we connect retailers directly with suppliers. Through there, the retailer can see that he has a promotion offered by a certain supplier, with the possibility to accept or reject it. This allows suppliers to offer tailor-made promotions, they do not have to be massive to all points of sale, to the 4,500 we have today, but can be something specific for a certain sector, department, area, neighbourhood, locality, etcetera.
The system is in Spanish and Portuguese, but also in Chinese, due to the rise of Chinese supermarkets in Argentina.
Yes, it was necessary for further growth. In our call centre there are also people who are fluent in the language to meet these needs.
You have already expanded to five countries in the region, is it on the medium-term horizon to reach the Asian market?
One of the ambitions of Raúl Polakof, one of the entrepreneurs, is for this device to penetrate the world. But we are taking it one step at a time. Today we are focused on Brazil. This has been a year of strong growth in that country. There is also demand for landing in Colombia and Central America; then Asia would be the company's next step.
How are you affected by the economic adversities in Brazil?
We have only been in Brazil for a year and a half. We have changed our business model a bit. We are not going with iPos specifically, because the shops we are targeting there, the medium-sized supermarkets (not big chains), already have a billing system. What we did was to develop a device, the API, that connects with the billing system of that point of sale and gives them specific promotions. Our situation in Brazil is perhaps somewhat different from that of other sectors, because in times of crisis, carrying a promotion that allows us to have more consumer traffic and sales is definitely attractive.
Is most of the turnover still in Uruguay?
Yes, but certainly the expectation is that Uruguay will not have such a heavy burden later on.
What is the company's current export volume?
Today we import all the work; the developers are in Uruguay. In fact, in 2002-2003, Scanntech was among the top 10 companies in Uruguay by volume of software sales abroad. Today we measure the number of boxes we have per country, per region. In Uruguay we have about 4,900. In Brazil, in a short period of time we are already exceeding 10,000 and we are growing in Peru, Paraguay and Argentina. The idea is for the Brazilian model to grow strongly with this API system and to take it to Argentina. Both are geographies with businesses that already have an invoicing system. This is not the case in Peru, Uruguay or Colombia, where there is also a need to introduce the system.
Do you have an estimate of how many shops still do not have POS in Uruguay?
It is clear to us that this is a very large universe, especially in the warehouse channel. I am referring to the billing system, because some may already have a "pin pad" for swiping credit cards, but we sell the billing system. We have a very big project: to grow by about 3,000 points of sale, with a focus on the store channel. We also have many iPos in the pharmacy channel, which today do not work as a billing system with price tracking, but they are providing services (such as mobile phone recharging). We are going to provide pharmacies with the electronic price list, which changes much more than in a supermarket or self-service store. This is something that the channel has been demanding for a long time and we will implement it in the second half of the year.
How do you identify and attract potential customers?
We are often supported by suppliers, such as Salus, FNC and Coca-Cola, who come to the shops to sell their products. In some cases, they share with us the detailed lists of how many they reach by department or by locality, and we have a sales team that visits the points to offer them our solution. So we have a very large database.
What minimum turnover does a business have to have to incorporate this system?
There is no minimum. Tax benefits for incorporating the system can be granted to outlets with a turnover of up to 4 million Indexed Units per year (today about US$ 432,000). But it is difficult to think of a store without a technological solution; sooner or later it must have one. With the shift from food tickets to cards, the shop must inevitably have a solution for the consumer, otherwise he or she will go to another shop that will allow him or her to make transactions.
Investment funds, such as Austral Capital and Sequoia Capital, were vital to the expansion in the region. Are they still part of the shareholding package?
Yes, together with founding directors Raúl Polakof and Benny Szylkowski. Austral Capital was the first major investor in 2010, a Chilean fund that invests in both renewable energy and key technologies for the region's development. And in 2011 Sequoia arrived, which attracted attention because it was the first investment of this group (which invested in companies such as Google, Dropbox, LinkedIn or Apple before they were successful) in South America. And then it made another injection in 2014. We have other investors, such as Bytham Holdings, which is one of the main shareholders of Brazil's Itaú, and the International Finance Corporation, which is the main international development institution, and also Endeavor.
What changes did Sequoia's arrival bring to the company?
The organisation was professionalised, with a strong focus on the customer. Uruguay benefited from this investment; in such a small country it is very difficult to invest in developing technology because, with such high costs, the market cannot afford it. However, when you invest with expansion in mind, you manage to work on scale and that benefits Uruguay.
Scanntech was authorised by the Central Bank as an e-money issuer. What will they do about it?
That would be a new business unit. We have the approval, but we need an injection of capital to be able to move forward on this. We are looking for a way.
"We will call all customers at least once a year".
How do you monitor customer satisfaction?
This is something that is very characteristic of the company, tracking satisfaction in order to take action. We don't stop doing it, because when we call them to check their satisfaction, we also take the opportunity to tell them about new developments, services and functionalities that the system may have. This is something we do from our call centre and now, as the number of points of sale grows, we are taking measures to comply and to be able to call all our customers at least once a year. In fact, we have a target of calling them every two months. That is clearly the focus, because we all owe it to customer satisfaction.
How competitive is the market?
It is a market that with all the financial inclusion has become more competitive, but at the same time we work to be closer to our customers and to keep them satisfied so that we don't have to lose any of them. We have been accompanying some of them for 25 years and we are adjusting to market changes to provide them with better solutions and keep them happy.
Source: Portal El País By Marcela Dobal
Connect