Impact Africa advances forward

With multimillion-rand deals made in 2006 and early 2007, plus several new business contracts signed and in the pipeline for 2007, Impact Africa is advancing its way up the mid-market segment of the ERP landscape.

The recent contracts signed with Schneider Electric, TOSAS, BidVest Afcom, Delta Pharmaceuticals and Avroy Shlain have proved that the EOH company and SYSPRO partner, Impact Africa, is underlining its leading position among mid-market ERP vendors.

Keith Farley, director of Impact Africa, believes strengthening its project management and general technical skills capabilities to complement its existing SYSPRO technical skills played a key role in securing these multimillion-rand projects.

He explains: "SYSPRO was traditionally perceived as an ERP system for smaller companies, while mid-size and larger commercial and industrial companies used to believe they could only find suitable ERP systems from the larger vendors. However, ERP is increasingly forming the backbone to which specific modules serving additional needs, such as e-procurement, CRM or supply chain management, are added according to the specific needs of the company. Size of vendor no longer matters as much, but functionality, reduced risk, expected ROI, scalability and ongoing support, do."

Farley strongly believes that Impact Africa should constantly keep Michael Porter's competitive advantage principles in mind when implementing SYSPRO ERP for its clients. He believes that a business solution vendor must ultimately apply itself to understanding the strategic business needs of its client inside-out, ensuring that any new system reinforces, if not creates, a competitive advantage.

In line with this philosophy, Impact Africa decided to make its ability to adapt the systems environment to suit the client - a key component of its market strategy. About two years ago, the company decided to adapt its staffing strategy accordingly - and is already seeing positive results.

"After evaluating our weaker areas, we decided to diversify the skills of our team. We took nine people onboard with strengths as varied as project management, industrial engineering knowledge, business intelligence and system development. They complement the extensive SYSPRO knowledge of our existing team extremely well," explains Farley.

Impact Africa also got young graduates from EOH's graduate programme and is happy with the results of this decision, as they have contributed by bringing fresh, young energy into the team.

With this combination of technical know-how, project management and business skills, Impact Africa now focuses on configuring SYSPRO solutions to optimise the return on IT investment for its clients, whatever their size.

"This business is all about partnership. Our clients are looking for a solid partner who understands their business problem and finds ways to configure a technical solution that solves it in the most economical way possible," says Farley. He explains that adding complementary modules onto an existing platform is a cost-effective way to serve a variety of profiles. For Schneider Electrical and Avroy Shlain, for instance, Impact Africa worked with software partner Afrisoft in developing the TransLution warehouse management system to integrate with the SYSPRO ERP backbone.

"An ERP implementation is a difficult process. But Impact Africa is always present and assists us promptly whenever an issue arises," says Ferdi Retief, IT manager at Avroy Swiss Garde.

Impact Africa is currently enjoying considerable growth per annum and the new deals already in the pipeline give Farley confidence that it will be a good year. Future plans include taking more consultants on board to cater for existing and forthcoming deal. "If we could take another ten consultants on board, we would," concludes Farley.