Software Futures has secured a contract to deploy Microsoft Great Plains in the operations of physical security service provider Securicor in 18 African and eastern European countries.
The deployment of Great Plains will allow Securicor to integrate its disparate systems and simultaneously allow the organisation to conduct financial operations offline.
Great Plains replaces a combination of Scala and Pastel. The previous offerings did not scale well to the size of Securicor's operations, following a recent merger with security company Gray.
"Africa suffers from poor infrastructure, one of the biggest challenges we faced in choosing a solution. Great Plains resolves this with its ability to operate offline and update our database in Pretoria as needed," says Karel Meyer, group financial director at Securicor. "The product also gives us the financial control features of other enterprise solutions and is a good fit for our business, which consists of smaller operations in various countries."
Software Futures, although not represented in the countries in which Securicor operates, has a large, experienced team of 140 Microsoft-oriented developers and 16 Great Plains qualified staff. A team of five is currently performing the Securicor deployment, each with a combination of Great Plains skills, accounting degrees and between seven and nine years' experience.
"As opposed to just deploying Great Plains, we add value in the form of our overall Microsoft expertise with the ability to offer a holistic solution based on our build, blend and buy strategy," says Paul Brito, solution owner, Microsoft business solutions at Software Futures.
"In Securicor's case we are building an e-learning solution to help train staff because it is difficult to get the requisite training skills to the company's sites throughout Africa. We are also in the preliminary stages of developing a customer relationship management solution."
Securicor has operations in Pretoria, Zambia, Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Namibia, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Mozambique, Lesotho, Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Eritrea, Mali and Kosovo.
The deployment is progressing in stages. Securicor's head office in Pretoria went live last year, Zambia and Malawi are up and running with Tanzania, the DRC, Ivory Coast, Mauritius and Namibia to follow. Kenya, by far the largest site outside of SA, will see the entire Software Futures team come together for its deployment. That will round up the deployment with projected completion this month. The remaining Securicor sites do not perform financial operations, so deployment will be deferred to the larger nearby sites where Great Plains will be implemented.
"We expect the biggest implementation challenges to be in the Portuguese- and French-speaking countries, where language is a barrier to both systems and training, although Great Plains is multilingual and handles multiple currencies," says Meyer.
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