Industrial & Financial Systems (IFS) South Africa has implemented a significant business system contract - a R3-million deal with MTN for the supply of IFS Retail solution to MTN retail outlets nation-wide.
After a two-month initial implementation phase, the first MTN outlet went live in Morningside, Johannesburg, on 12 March, with the balance coming on stream on 15 March.
IFS SA is part of the Swedish-owned IT group that is the world`s fastest growing business applications vendor and a pioneer in the development of component-based enterprise solutions. IFS South Africa, the company`s 61st global office, was established a year ago.
"The whole MTN project has gone very well considering that this is just one of several strategic IT and business projects currently being implemented at MTN," says Paul Whalley, General Manager, IFS South Africa.
"These different projects obviously added a certain complexity to the task, but the IFS solution, being component-based, is integrating well with the other back office financial and billing systems."
MTN decided to replace its existing retail system because it wanted better reporting functionality to be able to institute improved management control. It had to be a flexible, `future-proof` system with full back-office integration and extended back-office capabilities.
"We needed additional data elements to ensure optimum control over some aspects of our business, so we needed an enhanced system that would be able to manage this data and allow us to access it and get the reports we needed," says Barnie Barnard, IS Development Manager, MTN.
"Local support was also critical. IFS, being a global company, has committed to SA by establishing a full subsidiary here and has a strong support infrastructure, both in-house and third-party, already in place."
IFS has extensive experience in the telecoms industry worldwide - Brazil, Norway, Greece, Latin America and Poland to name but a few.
The IFS Retail solution, apart from meeting key criteria to integrate easily with back office systems, had numerous features that met MTN`s specific requirements. These included IFS` unique capability of supporting multiple price lists and the ability to track handset serial numbers.
"It met all these plus several other fundamental requirements which we believe we need to ensure that our retail outlets enhance their control over their businesses and improve customer satisfaction levels," concludes Barnard.
"MTN has indicated that there are some major advantages IFS has over the competition in terms of speed to implement, ability to change and the ease with which changes can be made to the system. In addition, reporting from the system is very powerful and easy to use," adds Chris Kushke, Business Development Manager IFS and Account Manager for MTN.
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