The Rogers Group, the largest organisation in Mauritius, will be able to outsource the services of many of its 300 accountants, following the rationalisation of disparate accounting functions into one centralised system based on a solution from JD Edwards, now part of PeopleSoft.
The move will open new business opportunities for the Rogers Group in the financial services sector, which has been targeted by the Mauritian government as one of the primary growth areas for the country along with the IT sector.
The solution runs in an application service provider (ASP) model which means that the outsourced accounting team can provide services to other companies in the Indian Ocean Islands and in the African countries in which it operates
The Rogers Group employs 6 500 people and has an annual turnover of $350 million. It has offices in France, Madagascar, Comoros, Mayotte, Mozambique, Reunion, Senegal, SA and Rodriguez and is active in aviation, tourism, hotels, engineering, waste management, transportation of petroleum products, food and consumer goods, wholesale of chemicals and pharmaceutical products, finance, shipping, logistics and freight forwarding as well as corporate services such as finance and accounting, corporate affairs, human resources and legal.
The group wanted to consolidate accounts and common processes. Many of the companies in the group sell to the same customers with each company setting its own credit limit. The Rogers Group wanted one credit limit per customer. Its home-grown systems and proprietary hardware were no longer adequate.
J-Enterprise, an enterprise solutions provider and a division of Enterprise Outsourcing Holdings (EOH), formed primarily to focus on JD Edwards solutions, went into a joint venture with ESP, the solutions arm of the Rogers Group, to handle the two-year project. The project entailed the outsourcing of the entire IT department at the Rogers Group.
JD Edwards, now PeopleSoft, competed against Oracle, Sage Tetra, Lawson and SAP for the ERP systems solution and was selected because it was able to work in true partnership with a large geographically diverse organisation with various and complex business requirements. It was also felt that the company could deliver benefits to the entire business no matter how large or small the division.
Vishal Nunkoo of ESP comments: "The architectural openness was key in the group`s decision. Because Rogers is such a diversified group we required software that could be integrated easily with other systems, such as our specialist aviation and insurance software that was developed in-house."
ESP and J-Enterprise implemented financials, distribution and manufacturing modules. They standardised across the board, on Hewlett-Packard hardware. The companies where the implementation is complete are operating off a centralised database.
The implementation is in the areas of finance, distribution, manufacturing, job costing, plant and equipment and payroll. Payroll was previously run centrally on the Rogers Group`s own software. Some 40% of the implementation is now complete - amounting to 200 PeopleSoft users. The target for the end of next year is 500.
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