With humble beginnings of three staff members in 2002, Bula Technologies opened its doors to aspirations of remaining 100% black-owned while epitomising service excellence leadership in the ICT market.
"Those are two tenets we`ve stuck to throughout our three years of operation," says Leocardo Forbay, Bula`s director of service and public sector activities.
"We are still 100% black-owned and as testimony to our service excellence, we recently took home Standard Bank`s Best BEE Supplier accolade for 2005.
"What made this award even more of an honour for us was that it wasn`t only focused on the ICT sector - we were the top BEE supplier to Standard Bank across all of its procurement areas," Forbay enthuses.
Forbay says awards of this stature are nothing new to Bula. "In 2004 we walked away with Oracle`s `Best New Partner` award for South Africa, following this up with Oracle`s 2005 Business Excellence Award for the EMEA region.
"We attribute winning all of these accolades to our commitment to solid customer relationships, the provision of quality products and service levels, not to mention maintaining open lines of communication with suppliers and customers at all times," he says.
Forbay says adhering to these commitments is the reason the company has secured business with clients such as Standard Bank, First National Bank, Sanlam and the South African Post Office.
Bula`s core competences were at the outset focused on infrastructure services, software implementation and support and the provision of printer solutions. To a great degree this is where the company has derived the majority of its success. With the recent acquisition of Miraculum, Bula has extended its offering to further include application hosted services.
With its focus still on the printer solutions area, the company has also grown to include contract-consumables as part of its solutions portfolio.
Along with its competency development, Bula has grown in staff numbers substantially over the past three years. "While we started operations with only three staff members, in the couple of years since our inception we`ve expanded our staff complement to 42, with offices in Gauteng and the Western Cape.
"We have also managed to maintain our equity numbers at 65% over our three years of operation," he adds.
Forbay cites negotiating the transition from SMME to medium-sized organisation, both in terms of staff numbers and turnover, as the biggest challenge the company has faced over the past three years.
He says the company had to remain focused on its core goals of providing excellent customer service and growing its revenues, while at the same time ensuring it was properly resourced to deal with its customer demands.
Forbay says the company`s revenue grew to the tune of 45% over its first year of operation and a further 50% in its third year. "At this point, we seem well set to increase that revenue figure again, by an additional 33%," he enthuses.
Although until now the company has been strongly aligned with Dell, Lexmark and Oracle, Forbay says its most recent partnership, namely the one it has forged with ACT, holds strong potential for growth and promises exciting new business opportunities.
"From a developmental perspective, we`ve been putting massive effort into working more closely with ACT to build consumables solutions that offer our customers true value. We have also been focusing on ACT`s Enterprise Solution, offering customers a single, centralised contact point for consumables procurement and management.
"The value proposition comes from the customer`s ability to leverage economies of scale in terms of pricing and gain access to a partner in Bula, that helps them manage their print fleet and the logistics behind the consumables procurement process," he says.
Looking forward, he believes Bula`s past successes are only the start. "We`ve proven that solid customer relationships and a core focus on service excellence is something that customers have been lacking up until now.
"By evolving this strategy going forward and focusing on our strengths, we believe we will go from strength to strength in the coming years," he concludes.
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Advanced Channel Technologies (Pty) Ltd (ACT) is a focused supplier of high quality IT consumables and printers.
The company`s products and value-added services support cost-effective print management, risk management in the data storage arena, and quality output to all media formats, including speciality papers.
ACT is committed to the delivery of world-class products and services to a national network of premier business partners and resellers who address the entire potential market for IT consumables in SA and neighbouring states in the SADC region.
The company operates as a fully-authorised supplier of a comprehensive range of high quality products that are manufactured by the world`s premier brand name vendors.
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