AFGRI scoops SAP 2011 EMEA Customer Quality Excellence Award

Issued by SAP SA for SAP Africa
Johannesburg, 25 Nov 2011

SAP Africa is pleased to announce the 2011 SAP Quality Award Winner for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA): AFGRI. The awards recognise customers that have achieved excellence in planning and executing SAP projects and programs, delivering significant benefits to their organisations.

“With an increase of more than 25% in nominations since 2010 and many excellent projects nominated, there were many strong customers, including several from Africa. We would like to thank all customers for their nominations, their partners for support throughout the nomination process, and to AFGRI and Bidco oil for representing Africa so well,” says Pfungwa Serima, Managing Director at SAP Africa.

“We are thrilled by this win. SAP has certainly helped our organisation to standardise business processes across various business units, with certain processes being centralised into shared services. We are now beginning to realise the benefits of efficiencies and cost savings. Through SAP we were able to consolidate nine Great Plains instances and one SAP Loans instance into a single SAP instance, to provide real-time transparency across the value chain, centralised procurement with savings due to aggregated spend. This competition has been worth the process and exposed our organisation to world best practices,” says Graeme Bredell, Group CIO at AFGRI.

Prior to announcing the EMEA winners, a total of 20 SAP customers were shortlisted - out of all the local gold winners in the SAP market units, including Africa. AFGRI and Bidco oil were the two gold local winners in their respective categories. The two customers were submitted to compete at EMEA level with other customers, and both projects were shortlisted within EMEA, with AFGRI winning the Gold medal in EMEA Large Enterprise category. Bidco oil was shortlisted in the small/medium category in EMEA, but did not win.

“The AFGRI success is the result of relentless focus on and the continual monitoring of the fundamentals. An upfront detailed scoping and planning phase led to the establishment of mutual trust between AFGRI and Deloitte. The project was implemented with a united team, including the best resources from both parties, where failure was never an option, and the programme management was exemplary. The executive buy-in, alignment and on-the-ground participation also contributed significantly to the successful outcome,” says Richard McWilliams, Project Director at Deloitte.

“The AFGRI SAP implementation was a satisfying example of SAP Best Practices being excellently adopted to ensure a smooth and successful implementation, delivering the expected outcome and business value. Adoption of the 10 SAP quality principles, particularly the implementation of a quality plan that embodied quality standards, methodology, and industry best practices, together with a formal quality management system to evaluate the solution and deliverables against agreed standards, has been the key to an award-winning SAP implementation for AFGRI,” says Rajendra Dhaniraj, Quality Director at SAP Africa.

There were a total of three categories and winners for the Africa Market Unit Gold Award, and the names are:

* Small and Midsize Enterprise Implementation category: Bidco oil
* New Business Application Implementation category: no winner in Africa
* Large Enterprise Implementation category: AFGRI

This year, SAP received submissions from a total of 184 customers across the EMEA region and of that Africa was the region with the highest submissions - 23 customers in total. SAP's focus on quality continues to grow momentum on the continent and SAP is taking action to work closer with all its partners and customers across the region in preparation for future quality excellence. “We want to better mitigate risks and ensure that implementations of SAP solutions are successful.

“On behalf of SAP, we would like to congratulate AFRGI for their successful implementations of SAP solutions and practices, for their focus, direction and clear quality standards. This is no easy task and deserves recognition. Thank you to each and every one of our customers for their participation and support,” concludes Rajendra Dhaniraj.

SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device - SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable more than 176 000 customers (includes customers from the acquisition of Sybase) to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com.

AFGRI

South Africa's leading agricultural services and foods business offering a wide range of physical and intellectual inputs to farmers, producers and users of agricultural products. As a transforming force in the business of agriculture, AFGRI offers farming clients banking, broking, logistics, trading and retail services and we are producers of animal feeds, poultry, and oil.

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