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What DANE data says about technology in Colombian companies

Only one in three industrial companies uses an ERP, and most of those without one believe they do not need it. What the ENTIC and EDIT surveys show, and what to do.

Published 2 min readBy Binary Bridges

  • data
  • DANE
  • digital transformation
  • SMEs
Read in Spanish

We often talk about “manual processes” as if it were a hunch. It isn’t: DANE, Colombia’s national statistics office, measures it. These are the numbers that matter most to us, read straight from its technical bulletins, and what we think they mean for a company that wants to be more competitive.

One in three

According to the ICT in Companies Survey (ENTIC Empresas) 2020, 34.1% of industrial companies use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. In commerce the figure is 31.5%.1

An ERP is not an end in itself, but it is a good indicator: it is where inventory, purchasing, invoicing and payroll live. Where there is none, that information usually lives in spreadsheets, email and people’s memory.

SubsectorUses ERPUses CRM
Industry34.1%16.4%
Commerce31.5%18.8%

“My activity doesn’t require it”

The same survey asks companies that do not use these tools why not. In industry:

  • 59.9% say their economic activity doesn’t require them;
  • 54.5% say they don’t have the budget to acquire them;
  • 50.8% admit they don’t know what the tools do.1

Note

Answers are not mutually exclusive: a company can pick several reasons, so the percentages add up to more than 100%.

The first reason is the one we care about most. It is not a technical problem: it is a belief. It holds while the environment stays the same. When it changes (a reform, a devaluation, a new competitor), the company without its data in order is the last to find out.

Seven in ten

The Technological Development and Innovation Survey in manufacturing (EDIT X) classifies companies by their innovation results. For 2019–2020, of 6,799 industrial companies surveyed, 4,820 were non-innovative: 70.9%. Only 11 were innovative in the strict sense.2

Important

EDIT X figures are preliminary, and both surveys are the latest editions DANE had published when this article was written. We use them for their method, not their recency.

What we do about it

All three figures point to the same thing: the obstacle is not only money, it is the distance between the company and the technology. That is why we work this way:

  1. Start by measuring. Before proposing software, we set a baseline: what the manual process costs today.
  2. Complete products for small companies. If budget is the barrier, our own products are free while the company is small.
  3. Explain before selling. If half of companies don’t know what these tools do, the first delivery is understanding, not licences.

If your company sees itself in any of these numbers, let’s talk.

Notes

  1. DANE (2022). Encuesta de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones en Empresas (ENTIC Empresas) 2020, tables 11 and 16. Technical bulletin. ^ ^

  2. DANE (2021). Encuesta de Desarrollo e Innovación Tecnológica en la industria manufacturera (EDIT X) 2019-2020, chart 2. Technical bulletin. ^