Business Background

The client is one of the most reputed companies in East Africa. They have achieved a leading position in manufacturing steel products for the building construction industry. The company was certified ISO 9002 earlier which has recently been upgraded to ISO 9001:2015. The client has now embarked on Product Certification with the Uganda National Bureau of Standards for galvanized iron sheets.

Objectives of ERP

Earlier, Client was facing problems in a few areas such as customer control at the factory and branches, delay in delivery customer, COIL Traceability, etc. They wanted to put an integrated system that would solve all these problems and place the reporting in a structured manner. After examining several options they decided to go for a cost effective ERP which would also take care of typical statutory issues of imports, taxation, etc. and also had a good understanding of the East African business environment. An ERP that would also be web enabled for future growth with low cost of scalability.

Solution Choice

The client was initially going in for Oracle Apps but when they saw ebizframe ERP and ESS’ strength in East Africa they realized ebizframe was a far more reliable and cost effective ERP and finally Company’s management decided to go ahead with ebizframe instead of Oracle Apps.

Pre-Implementation Scenario

The client opted for the standard business process modules available in ebizframe. Some major customization has been done in Production and Sales Modules to suit client’s specific business operation requirements. Some of the customizations are as follows:

• Pricelist Master for products along with the groups
• Customer category wise discount definition and history of old MRP
• Auto updation of serial number in Material Receipt Note through bar coding interface
• Tracking of products with BOE (Bill of Entry) details including costs and lot numbers
• Auto update of lot numbers in sales return
• Landed rate and Sales Profit Reports
• Cost and Profit Margin Reports

Benefits

• Having accurate information for available products and better control on customer related issues enables organization to give accurate information for product availability as required by Customer.
• Customers don’t need to wait in queue to get their products delivered. Customers can get their products on time and the company can give early information to them if a product is not available at their factory or branch in which case the customer can get it from another branch in case of urgency.
• Easy access to all the business related information from other branches as per employee’s specific role and assigned privileges. A branch can also access other branches and factory required information with proper control on customer info, accounts receivables and payables, etc.
• Better traceability in Production for all the processes and having superior control on the production line start from HRC, Sheets, Valleys, Gutter and Ridges, Flashings, Bull Nose, Expanded Metal, Eco Tiles & Ridges, Razor wire, nails etc. (Project benefits)
• Now all the 3 branches and HO are integrated and can easily share all the required information between the branches and factory on the basis of assigned privileges by System Administrator.
• It is now easier to handle all the inventory related transactions between the branches and factory and there is much better traceability to identify a product’s production hierarchy and because of this the HO is having full control on the business activities of all the branches.

Infrastructure – Ebizframe has been implemented on a Dell Server with Xeon Processor, 4GB RAM and with 1TB space having a RAID level security at the Kampala Office. More then 50 users are working with normal Pentium IV machines.