South African company becomes first Centre of Excellence for global customs management technology solution

Black-owned and managed South African information technology group, Tsohle Technology Holdings, has formed a joint venture known as TATIS Africa with Geneva-based customs management specialists, TATIS SA, to resell and implement TATIS solutions in South Africa and the rest of the Africa.

TATIS Africa has participated with SAP Africa in the Accenture consortium tendering for the South African Revenue Services tax and customs modernisation project with an offering that combines technology from SAP and TATIS SA.

Tsohle Business Solutions, a division of Tsohle Technology Holdings, also operates the global TATIS Centre of Excellence (COE) to provide development, support and maintenance services to TATIS customers worldwide. The COE was moved from Bangalore to Cape Town in January 2006. The exclusively South African COE team is already working with other implementation partners on the Luxembourg Customs modernisation project.

TATIS SA works with SAP as an alliance partner - with its customs domain expertise and intellectual property having been built into its TATIScms solution using J2EE as a development platform, which conforms to SAP's Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA) technology platform. The solution has since been ported onto SAP NetWeaver by the Cape Town COE and certified by SAP. It is therefore fully integrated with SAP's financials and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software.

"In other words, the combination of SAP and TATIS technology enables us to offer governments the world's only fully integrated, end-to-end solution to all their tax and customs management requirements," says TATIS Africa managing director, Emmanuel Diakakis. "It covers everything from duties and excise to regional and multilateral trade agreements - and forms an integral part of overall border management, immigration, health and agricultural processes at ports of entry, whether land, sea or air.

"Put another way, it is customs and border management in a box - which is particularly useful in Africa's resource-scarce environment. It enables governments that have been battling simply to control borders, much less comply with international customs and border regulations or collect the kinds of revenues that will contribute significantly to economic transformation, to very quickly get fiscal and security benefits and become an internationally accredited trading partner.

"Also, the TATIS / SAP solution is modular. So governments can start with any aspect of customs or border management functionality they feel is a priority and add other modules as their revenue collection capabilities, and therefore their purchasing power, improves.

Trek to the summit

00Days

:

00Hrs

:

00Min

:

00Sec

"In addition, as Africans ourselves, we at TATIS Africa understand the issues that impact technology implementations of this sort on the continent and we can address them appropriately and effectively."

Accenture senior executive, Jan Bouwer, says Accenture's experience in revenue and customs agencies has shown that there is an increasing need for pre-packaged solutions like the one being provided by the SAP /TATIS partnership. "Key to the success of these solutions is the need to base the customs and revenue solution on the same, proven enterprise system that is run in the rest of the organisation - in this case, SAP.

"We're also pleased with the establishment of the COE in Cape Town, because it helps position South Africa as a global off-shore service provider, and will make a strong contribution to local skills development and black economic empowerment."

Although TATIS SA was founded to provide trade solutions in southern Africa and already has projects in Zimbabwe and Zambia under its belt, it nonetheless chose Tsohle Technology Holdings as a joint venture partner and the site of its COE for purely business reasons.

"To ensure that we use the very best people for the job, we at TATIS in Geneva focus on the design of the solutions, based on our domain knowledge and experience, and then we outsource the software development to a world-class partner," says TATIS SA CEO, Charles Upchurch. "So, for version one of our software, we went to HP in Bangalore - who did a very good job.

"But to continue the development of the solution we wanted a partner who could make a contribution from their own experience. We have known Tsohle since 1993, when they were working on South Africa's first public private partnership - on a border control vehicle information system for the South African Police Service.

"We knew they could think outside of the box and realised that working with them would give us comfort not only on their border control experience but also in terms of their significant IT capability.

"And, of course, it helps to have a COE so close to the African market, where we believe our products and services can make a positive difference to local economies. We're also proud of having an association with a black-owned and managed South African information technology company and therefore participating in the transformation of that sector."