South African National Parks (SANParks), a statutory body that manages a system of more than 20 national parks including the world famous Kruger National Park, has completed its Microsoft Great Plains implementation.
The project was carried out by Datacentrix, recipient of the Microsoft Business Solutions Partner of the Year 2003 award. As part of the project, Datacentrix assisted SANParks with integrating its e-procurement, reservations and human resources (HR) systems.
The project has enabled SANParks to replace disparate systems, comprising a number of home-grown and off-the-shelf solutions, used by its offices nation-wide.
Says Johan du Toit, divisional director at Datacentrix Solutions: "The rich functionality and security features of Great Plains software have enabled SANParks to replace its existing accounting system without any concern.
"Management of this system has been centralised, a key concern as many of the existing systems are situated in fairly outlying regions and can now be operated from the organisation`s Pretoria head office. This provides an integrated system that was the key objective behind this project. A more flexible, easy-to-use solution will also enable SANParks to attain the more long-term goals of increasing productivity and improving business performance," says Du Toit.
"The most significant benefit for SANParks is that our new system supports our decentralised business processes," explains Hannes Combrink, General Manager: Management Information Services at SANParks. "Because of the geographically distributed parks, we prefer to capture transactions as close to the point of origin as possible thereby ensuring timeous management information.
"The integration of our HR system into Great Plains has enabled us to identify where our personnel actually work. This means that when an employee logs in with their personnel number, the system verifies their location and gives the transaction number a prefix based on their location. This makes the management of documents far easier as we know exactly where they originated and where they are stored," he says.
The SANParks reservation office is currently still running on an older system of which the financial transactions have also been integrated into Great Plains. SANParks is planning to roll out its new hospitality management system in May and Datacentrix will also assist with the integration thereof into Great Plains.
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