Freedom Park Trust uses SAP solution to facilitate world-class management controls

Although it is a relatively small government department, the Freedom Park Trust (FPT), set up four years ago to oversee the creation of a heritage centre on 52-hectares south of Pretoria that will serve to commemorate and celebrate human dignity and freedom, has chosen to use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software from global software giant, SAP, to automate and integrate its management controls.

The operational challenges for the Trust are complex, involving the close management of considerable funds across such varied activities as having the park itself designed, building a museum, creating memorial space, and managing and maintaining all the diverse components of a heritage site. Until the beginning of February 2005, the Trust's management systems were paper-based - slowing decision-making, increasing financial risk, impeding transparency and making corporate governance unwieldy.

The decision to go with an integrated ERP system to ensure effective management of the project was made early in 2004. After an extensive tender process, Masana Technologies and its business partners, SAP and IBM, were awarded the implementation contract - and completed the project within a record six months, including the training of all users within Freedom Park Trust.

"The project was able to meet challenging deadlines because all partners involved - SAP as the software provider, IBM as the implementation partner and Masana Technologies as the ongoing support outsourcing partner - came together to deliver a robust and reliable solution to Freedom Park Trust," says IBM's Freedom Park Trust project manager, Seshni Samuel. "The project also used the full IBM Process methodology.

"The Freedom Park success story lies not in the magnitude or scope of the project but in the fact that it proves that SAP can become a tailored and viable solution for small businesses and companies. There is ongoing and relentless pressure within many organisations to search for strategic and sustainable competitive advantage. This pressure is no less within smaller organisations, whose search for solutions is made even more difficult by greater time and resource constraints.

"Additionally, Freedom Park required a solution that could allow them to evolve and grow as an organisation. SAP offered this flexibility, so that as FPT needs to they can add on solutions such as document management and physical inventory management, necessary, once the museum is fully operational."

John Nkwana, corporate services manager for the Freedom Park Trust, says: "We chose SAP, Masana and IBM because, in order for the Freedom Park to be the best of its kind, we needed not only a world-class solution but suppliers to support it who are themselves world-class.

"In addition, our extensive pre-purchase research showed that SAP offered the greatest value for money in terms of the long-term flexibility it gives us to evolve as an organisation. Also, its integration capabilities would cut repetition and redundancy out of our operations - creating a significant saving. And, it offered us the most effective means of empowering our employees quickly and comprehensively."

SAP Public Services' Charmaine Odendaal says the biggest contributor to the success of the Freedom Park Trust SAP implementation was the enthusiasm and commitment of the customer. "Everyone at the Trust believed from the outset that it was no use having a superb system unless you used it to the fullest extent. That made them proactively look for every single opportunity to maximise what mySAP ERP could do for them. And that helped us and IBM and Masana to create a system that will serve them superbly no matter what they demand of it.

"And we've been delighted to be able to prove, through this project, that mySAP works just as well and is just as affordable for small organisations as for big ones."

The initial mySAP ERP modules implemented by the Freedom Park Trust are Project Systems, Investment Management, Finance and Controlling, Asset Management, Human Resources and Materials Management incorporating Purchasing.