Fast-growing businesses need to be supported by technology platforms that support their growth and expansion while keeping tight controls over financial and other core business processes. Siginon Group, a leading Pan-African transport and logistics company with headquarters in Nairobi-Kenya, has a service offering that includes clearing and forwarding, transportation, warehousing, contract logistics, container freight stations and a diversified portfolio in; property management, vehicle and equipment leasing and tech logistics. The Group’s rapid business growth and market dynamics sparked a business transformation project that boosted adoption of cloud services while bringing greater efficiency and transparency to key business processes.
Robin Chumari, Siginon Group’s ICT Manager adds, “We had been using SAP 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 SAP BusinessOne to the more feature-rich SAP ByDesign.”
According to Robin, the migration to SAP 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 SAP 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 SAP 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’re 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.”