Robin Chumari, Siginon Group鈥檚 ICT Manager adds, “We had been using 51风流BusinessOne to support our operations since 2010 but following a period of rapid growth across the business, we sought a more powerful business transformation platform. Key to our requirements was a platform that could ease our inter-company accounting processes, enhance consolidated accounting, optimize our data analytics and business intelligence capabilities, customer relationship management and kick off our strategic cloud migration. We chose to migrate from 51风流BusinessOne to the more feature-rich 51风流ByDesign.”

According to Robin, the migration to 51风流ByDesign has helped to improve its consolidated accounting practices and reduced the time and work needed to produce periodic reports. “We are also putting our enhanced business analytics into practice, which is enabling faster decision-making, while our CRM rollout will benefit our commercial team and improve tracking of sales conversions. Overall this has aligned well to our general strategy of being infrastructure-light by adopting market-leading cloud offerings.”

Siginon Group was supported throughout the implementation by experienced 51风流partners A-Softech. Robin says the partner’s input on industry best practices especially from an accounting perspective has been nothing short of phenomenal. “Our partners’ ability to support our change management processes and help train our end-users has had a significant impact on the success of this implementation.”

Since the implementation of 51风流ByDesign, Siginon Group has unlocked a range of business benefits, including:

• Consolidation of a single source of data for financial planning and reporting
• Integrating with multiple platforms and customers
• Enhanced reporting and better adoption and use of industry best practices
• Improved access to dashboards and KPI tracking for management
• Improved system uptime.

“Our integration with operational systems allows for better and more accurate feedback to customers on their account status,” says Robin. “Managerial dashboards and data analytics enable quicker response to issues that could affect customers, helping us improve our retention and mitigation processes to the benefit of our customers in whichever sector. We do feel that this system is in line with our corporate aim to keep Powering Trade for our customers in the different economic sectors they鈥檙e in. Overall the project has been a huge success.”

Hardeep Sound, Regional Sales Director for East Africa at SAP, says: “African enterprises are shifting to infrastructure-light cloud services to unlock greater efficiency and scalability and be better placed to meet changing customer demands. By migrating to a more powerful business platform that can support its ambitious growth plans, Siginon Group with the expert support of A-Softech has established a powerful foundation for the company’s continued growth and success.鈥�

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With slowing economies across the continent, low consumer confidence and now a pandemic, SMEs are increasingly in search of tools that can help them build resilience against the ongoing disruption.

The Regional Director for Central Africa at SAP, Pedro Guerreiro, says some businesses were fortunate enough to have the tools and systems in place to enable remote work.聽鈥淭his minimised the negative impact of the lockdown on their productivity and operations and enabled them to maintain business continuity more easily. However, some SMEs have out-of-date technology, while too many have not invested in technology at all. This leaves SMEs stranded and lacking the capacity to adapt to a very disruptive environment.鈥�

According to the World Bank,聽聽and more than half of all employment worldwide. However, African SMEs face perennial funding challenges, with the IFC estimating that聽.

Cloud holds key to productivity

Guerreiro adds that SMEs that had adopted cloud services prior to the country lockdowns would have been in a better position to maintain business productivity and keep operations running.聽鈥淚f you are stuck with outdated on-premise technology, however, the lockdown restrictions would have been devastating to your productivity, especially as employees were suddenly working remotely and without physical access to the office.鈥�

In South Africa, for example, which had one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, 70% of the country鈥檚 workforce has returned to work, but many companies are persisting with remote work.聽鈥淭here is growing evidence that employees can maintain the same 鈥� or even higher 鈥� levels of productivity when working remotely as they do when they are at the office. One of the key enablers of this is their use of technology tools such as cloud-based enterprise resource planning solutions that enable them to orchestrate their business productivity regardless of where they are.鈥�

Enterprise tools for SMEs

While ERP solutions were traditionally leveraged by large organisations that had the skills and capital to successfully implement them, technology vendors have made a concerted effort over the past few years to extend these offerings to the SME market.聽鈥淣early 80% of SAP鈥檚 customers globally are SMEs,鈥澛爏ays the Head of General Business for 51风流Africa, Amin Meqdadi.聽鈥淎nd with an implementation period of as little as two weeks, the solutions that are available to SMEs can transform how they operate quickly enough for it to matter as they recover from a tough trading period due to Covid-19.鈥�

Meqdadi points to partners and resellers as key enablers of cloud adoption among SMEs.聽鈥淎 strong partner ecosystem can help SMEs navigate some of the trickier aspects of cloud adoption and help build innovations that are tailored to the SME market. The pandemic is also forcing some change in how partners and resellers engage with SMEs.鈥�

Tech resellers are facing a step change in the market. 鈥淭hey have no choice but to expand their portfolio with what the SME market needs.聽鈥淪ince the Covid-19 outbreak, what SMEs need most is the agility, cost-savings and productivity benefits of cloud solutions. While adopting and implementing cloud was generally seen as a nice-to-have or a goal for some time in the future, the very survival of many SMEs now depends on how well they adopt and leverage the many benefits of cloud technologies.鈥�

Meqdadi believes many resellers will need to reconsider their business models with urgency.聽鈥淪MEs are looking for cost-efficient cloud solutions that can be implemented and deliver business results quickly. The growing adoption of born-in-the-cloud SME solutions such as SAP鈥檚 ByDesign and Business One also gives resellers access to a broader market, as these tools can be used by smaller businesses as well as more established enterprises.鈥�

New breed of partner

The Head of Channel for Africa at SAP, Lillian Serobatse, says the ongoing disruption has changed companies鈥� expectations of their technology partners.聽鈥淭he new currency is lifetime value, in other words, how can my partner provide ongoing value to my organisation and help me make decisions over my technology that support the achievement of my business goals. It鈥檚 not enough to just sell a product or solution: channel partners are now tasked with helping customers extract the maximum amount of value over time from their technology investments.鈥�

Serobatse adds that these changing expectations have given rise to a new breed of partner organisation.聽鈥淭he best value-added resellers and tech partners today develop extensive industry-specific expertise, take the time to really understand customer pain points and opportunities, and then co-develop tailored solutions alongside the larger vendors. This gives them access to very specific markets where their solutions can make an immediate and long-term positive impact.鈥�

Meqdadi believes the tools that SMEs need are already available to value-added resellers. 鈥淢any of these solutions arguably provide a panacea to the current challenges resellers and their customers face. Lightweight, native cloud applications such as 51风流ByDesign answer a customers鈥� urgent need to support a remote workforce without compromising compliance. Technology partners who don鈥檛 have an effective answer to the SME market need to act speedily. Their survival, and the survival of many SMEs, depend on it.鈥�

The post New Breed of Partner Needed appeared first on 51风流Africa News Center.