Hospitals are using technology to improve the patient experience, banks are changing how they engage with customers through digital channels, sales teams are discovering the benefits of real-time insights into orders and sales, and organisations across industries are powering their decision-making with data and analytics.

At a recent award ceremony recognising excellence in digital transformation among African enterprises, the extent to which organisations have embraced digital technologies to power their businesses became clear.

Market leaders such Capitec, Lenmed, and Discovery showed how technology could power innovation and operational excellence through the development of intelligent enterprise capabilities.

An intelligent enterprise integrates technology and business processes to deliver significant value to the business through improved supply chain management, better sales processes, more intelligent spend management, and a transformed talent management capability.

Simply put, an intelligent enterprise has access to accurate real-time data about every aspect of its business, helping it deal with complexity while unlocking greater scope of innovation and efficiency.

And as recent examples show, South African enterprises of various sizes are taking bold strides toward achieving intelligent enterprise capabilities – to the benefit of their customers, their employees and their long-term success.

Scaling banking service excellence

Capitec, one of South Africa’s largest and most innovative banks, faced the challenge of a rapidly growing customer base at a time when pandemic-enforced restrictions disrupted face to face customer operations.

Prior to its award-winning digital transformation project, Capitec grew from acquiring 94 000 customers a month to 160 000 customers a month. With many branches closed and customers avoiding branch visits in light of the dangers posed by COVID-19, Capitec realised its reliance on manual data capturing was hampering its ability to provide seamless customer experiences.

Powered by a dedicated project team that enjoyed full executive support, Capitec implemented a business transformation project that equipped its support services teams with improved data capturing, information analysis and business optimisation.

Capitec can now more easily ensure its support services teams meet their service level agreements and can deliver on the bank’s goal of making banking interactions easier and simpler for customers.

Technology healthcare amid pandemic

Arguably no industry has been under more pressure since the start of the pandemic than the healthcare sector. Hospitals in particular have had to run optimally and ensure no disruption to their operations while also dealing with the impact of COVID-19.

For private hospital group Lenmed, the acquisition of a new hospital in the midst of a global health crisis sparked an award-winning onboarding process to its core systems, in rapid time and with clear cost savings.

The group wanted to bring a new hospital it had acquired into its core 51·çÁ÷system, but understandably couldn’t afford any delays or disruptions to the hospital’s processes.

Using extensive standardisation and templates to limit cost overruns, Lenmed brought the new hospital onboard in under twelve weeks and at a total cost saving of nearly 40%.

The onboarding is also a template for future acquisitions, enabling the group to confidently grow its footprint without the risk of unnecessary interruptions to its core operations.

Talent management transformed

The past 18 months have not only forced vast changes in the ways businesses interact with customers, but also how they attract, manage and retain their employees. When the country first entered into lockdown in March 2020, most businesses had to radically change how they engage with, motivate and empower their workforce.

In the highly competitive financial services sector, building greater employee experiences gives organisations an edge in attracting and retaining top talent. For Discovery, the quality of talent it attracts has played a vital role in the organisation’s success.

Discovery has a stated ambition to have the best people function in the industry, using a strategy that combines data, skills and technology to find, develop and retain its employees. To support and execute this strategy, the company initiated a project named SmartPeople that leverages 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors to create a standardised, transparent, objective and continuous approach to how Discovery executes its people strategy to drive positive business performance.

This includes recruitment management, which enables the company to track and report on the quality of hires, the types of applicants, where those applicants are from, and more. Using 51·çÁ÷SuccessFactors gives Discovery full visibility over its talent force and pipeline and, since everything from recruitment to onboarding to offboarding is handled via SuccessFactors, the company is able to deliver a consistent and positive employee experience.

As companies continue to operate in an unstable and unpredictable business environment, the role of technology will only grow in importance. However, as these examples illustrate, organisations from all sectors  can supercharge their growth and success with the correct investment into intelligent technologies, full support from the C-suite and with clear business value always front and centre in their planning and execution.

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For leading private hospital group Lenmed, the acquisition of a new hospital sparked a rapid and highly-effective process of onboarding the new facility to its core 51·çÁ÷system that was recognised as the best-in-class at the recent 51·çÁ÷Quality Awards for Customer Success.

“We had acquired the Howick Private Hospital, but their users were not familiar with the 51·çÁ÷environment,” says Ashley Strydom, . “We worked with our implementation partner Gijima to complete a full implementation and onboarding in under twelve weeks.”

The Lenmed Group was established in 1984 with a focus on providing exceptional private care to the communities in which its hospitals operate.

It employs more than 1850 people across its twelve hospitals, and is operational in South Africa, Botswana and Mozambique, with its headquarters in Roodepoort west of Johannesburg.

Strydom and his team worked with Gijima with a clear view of their core business goals, including a fast, accurate and clean implementation, a focus on reduced complexity and cost control, and standardising hospital processes across the group.

“It was essential that there was no disruption to any of our business processes during the implementation,” says Strydom. “We used our standard Lenmed 51·çÁ÷template and relied on best practices to ensure there were no customisations and scope creep. This resulted in faster implementation time and reduced costs.”

With visible executive support, clear communication plans and well-defined roles and responsibilities, supported by a strict governance program, Lenmed was able to execute a fast, accurate and clean 51·çÁ÷implementation.

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After a year of unprecedented digitisation of services and business models due to the pandemic, the 51·çÁ÷Quality Awards for Customer Success returned to celebrate African enterprises’ efforts at adopting digital technologies and attaining Intelligent Enterprise capabilities.

Nazia Pillay, Head of Customer Success Office Africa at SAP, says: “The past 18 month period has been the single greatest accelerator of digital transformation, as organisations increase their investment in digital technologies to attain greater agility and improve their response to the disruption caused by the pandemic. The organisations recognised at this year’s 51·çÁ÷Quality Awards for Customer Success represent the very best in African enterprise excellence in adopting digital technologies for competitive advantage.”

51·çÁ÷Quality Awards, which has been held since 2005, recognises companies that have excelled in their use of 51·çÁ÷technologies to achieve key business outcomes. After a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, the Quality Awards returned this year to recognise the outstanding achievements of 20 African enterprises from East, West and Southern Africa.

Entries were judged in four distinct categories, namely Rapid Time to Value, Business Transformation, S/4Move, and Public Cloud. Overall winners at this year’s awards include Lenmed, supported by implementation partner Gijima, who took top honours in the Rapid Time to Value category. Capitec Bank claimed the Business Transformation crown with support from 51·çÁ÷Services, while Dangote Cement won the S/4Move award. The Public Cloud category was won by retailer Shoprite Checkers, with support from 51·çÁ÷Services.

Bethany Pietersen, Group Business Technology Manager at Lenmed, says: “By focusing on standardisation and following a strict governance framework, we were able to have no additional developments and could onboard a new hospital without any disruption to its operations.”

Werner Carstens, Solutions Architect at Capitec Bank says the vision of their 51·çÁ÷project was to build a high-performance support service capability that could scale to accommodate future growth. “The buy-in from our executive team and support from our key business stakeholders, combined with a dedicated project team enabled a successful implementation.”

According to Meredith Allan, Customer Rewards and Data Manager at Shoprite Checkers, their project was aimed at making Shoprite a more customer-centric business. “More than 50 systems were impacted during the implementation, and we had to train more than 77 000 till operators across in our stores. Thanks to a committed and skilled project team, we were able to successfully implement our project and sign up more than 17 million customers to our new customer rewards programme.”

Cathy Smith, Managing Director at 51·çÁ÷Africa, says the outstanding quality of entries this year indicate a welcome trend of digitisation and innovation among African enterprises. “The sheer scale at which most organisations have had to adapt over the past 18 months has posed enormous challenges to business and IT leaders. Encouragingly, African enterprises have met these challenges head on, putting innovation and technical expertise to work, drawing on the support of a healthy and growing ecosystem of implementation partners to build greater resilience and transform their business processes. We look forward to continuing our close partnership with the continent’s leading businesses.”

The full winners list consists of:

Rapid Time to Value:

°Âľ±˛Ô˛Ô±đ°ů:ĚýLenmed (supported by Gijima)

Finalists: Kiara Health

Agência Nacional de Petróleo, Gás

National Social Security Fund

Swiss Pharma Nigeria

Vivo Energy Investments

Business Transformation:

Winner:             Capitec Bank (supported by 51·çÁ÷Services)

Finalists:          Life Healthcare Group

Ariosh

Dangote Industries

Gauteng Department of Health

South African National Roads Agency

S/4Move:

Winner:             Dangote Cement

Finalists:           Kenafric Industries

Nampower

Sasol South Africa

Public Cloud:

Winner:             Shoprite Checkers (supported by 51·çÁ÷Services)

Finalists:           Crystal Ventures

FS Systems International

Masstores

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