The world has seen many changes since the economic slump, which brought with it an entirely new stance on how to remain profitable and keep ahead of competitors. Having a good product or service no longer guarantees success. You need to relook at how you do business, maximise productivity and break into new markets to improve profitability, says James Frampton, channel vice-president for Epicor EMEA, Epicor Software Corporation.
Africa offers the highest return on direct foreign investment in the world, according to the UN trade agency, UNCTAD. Africa is ripe for the picking, with a hunger for technology to support its growing contribution to the world's economy.
According to the IDC, the software market in the Middle East and North Africa is expected to grow by 10.9% in 2013. This is extremely robust compared to its European counterparts. As a result, we can expect to see software growth in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and Angola. While new markets are emerging in Rwanda, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Ethiopia.
Epicor inspires new, efficient, faster ways of doing business which supports the ambitions of a growing number of organisations that are looking to expand their African operations. However,Africaposes a challenging business environment due to various factors. These include a lack of infrastructure, shortage of skills and in some parts, poor governance. Added to this are the diversity of markets and legal and political systems. By understanding the everyday challenges of doing business, as well as those specific to Africa, Epicor works to help businesses identify and overcome their pain areas.
Having real-time visibility of every aspect of operations enables agility and rapid response to critical business issues. This supports decision-making and planning with hard facts, making an organisation leaner and meaner by reducing IT complexity that supports best practice, industry specific requirements and compliance across geographic boundaries.
Epicor has a firm foothold in Africa, with a history spanning more than 10 years. Its long-term customers have established a firm partnership with Epicor, many of which are using a range of Epicor products as their businesses have expanded, and with this, so have their system requirements.
The trend we are seeing in Africa is for investment to be channelled into modern, mobile-enabled solutions - a technological tool set that supports growth. In effect, Africa is bypassing traditional ERP implementations and large investments that much of the western world continues to wrestle with, due to their transactional nature.
Africa is a channel-driven market for Epicor and its manufacturing and distribution solutions. Developed with industry-specific requirements and a focus on operational functionality that goes beyond traditional ERP, Epicor uses the latest technology and applications to speed up and simplify critical processes and increasing the efficiency of how people work. In Africa, these solutions are brought to market through a strategic group of channel partners, who can apply this global technology to the African market. Unlike some of its competitors, Epicor doesn't focus on having a large channel with resellers that compete against each other. Epicor offers true partnerships, often with some sort of specialisation, perhaps domain- or vertically-driven or to cover certain geographic areas.
Epicor looks for partners with a long-term commitment to customers, who want to make a real difference to their clients' businesses and to invest in visionary solutions. To help them achieve success, Epicor not only offers one of the best ERP solutions in the world, but also a comprehensive and structured enablement programme coupled with the assistance from some of the industry's most talented channel professionals.
Epicor is positioned as a Visionary in Gartner's 'Magic Quadrant for Single-Instance ERP for Product-Centric Midmarket Companies'. The next-generation Epicor ERP is a new breed of solution - built on the Epicor ICE Business Architecture, the software is designed to offer extensive flexibility, usability, and agility in support of application-to-application integration and business-to-business collaboration, key to enabling the delivery of information throughout the enterprise.
The cornerstone of Epicor solutions lies in its passion, innovation, integrity, teamwork, excellence and service. With headquarters in Johannesburg, South Africa, Epicor supports customers across Africa through its dedicated network of channel partners.
With this ethos in place and a focus on offering a customer-centric product, Epicor has established a strong presence across the African continent. Its customer base has been increasing steadily to include some of the largest and most sophisticated systems currently in place. Epicor is now embarking on its next phase of growth and is looking for just a handful of channel partners to complement its existing infrastructure across the region. Epicor recognises the business potential that Africa has to offer and has the products and systems in place to take business in Africa to new heights.
Share