Leading Provider of SAP IT Solutions, ERP Solutions in East Africa Discusses Strategy

Interview with Mala Bhatt, Managing Director of Seidor Africa

In what areas of business are you present? What makes your company different?

Seidor East Africa started out about 17 years ago. We have a growing team of about 45 professionals in Nairobi. We also have offices in Tanzania that started in 2011. We look after customers predominantly within East Africa from this office including Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda. We also look after customers as far afield as West Africa, Dubai, and even China where we support and provide services.

Three years ago, we merged with the world’s largest SAP provider, Seidor, who are based out of Barcelona, Spain. This merger has further enhanced our focus internally and externally. It has also enhanced our global best practices that we have been able to deliver to our customers.

Seidor is in 28 countries across 52 locations with over 2,500 customers worldwide and about 4,000 consultants. We have our African headquarters in South Africa. We have ground presence in Zambia and Mauritius. In Africa, we are part of a group of companies where we are able to include SAP ERP, analytics, Cloud and infrastructure services, as well as the large SAP enterprise. For many years, we have been the largest SAP provider in our area, in the region, and in Africa.

We are very proud and delighted now that we are a global player in terms of the largest provider worldwide, known as what we call a platinum partner. Having worked in this region for the last 17 years, we have seen that customers require greater support prior to ERP implementation. We have a very solid, knowledgeable, and competent team that is able to deliver solutions to our customers and give them what they need when they need it.

In terms of challenges that our institution faces, we have a lot of competitors from outside of Kenya that come here to provide cheaper services at much lower quality. It is becoming very difficult for us to go out there and only fight based on price. We are focused and we are very clear that we need to value sell and we need to really look at the requirements of our customers and provide them with what they need and what our counterparts are doing elsewhere worldwide.

Customers are very demanding and they want everything yesterday. They may have had nothing, but they are not taking into account all the other facets such as resources and change management. We are becoming the trusted advisor in ERP and we are sitting down with them and going through a journey and not just reacting to what they are asking us to do.

We have also faced quite a lot of challenges with change management in organizations and that has also affected us in the manner in which we deal with and work with our customers. Occasionally, we have challenges and we lose some opportunities because we do not agree with certain work ethics and practices that may be going on in the region. We do not want to participate. That is quite big for us and we do lose some major work as a result of that.

What recognitions or awards have you received?

We have won SAP’s most prestigious award called the Pinnacle Award in 2017 and 2018. We have been the largest partner worldwide for a number of years. What differentiates us from the competition is that we are not just there to provide a replacement for what the customers have been using.

We want to go in and show the differentiator in terms of innovation and global best practices. We believe that being the platinum partner has also meant that we have had to ensure that we have sufficient ability and knowledge to be able to show our customers what machine learning can do for them, what the internet of things can do for them, how using their ERP they can be involved with certain artificial intelligence areas.

We believe that the selling of the product and the implementation are just small aspects. For us, the real marriage actually begins after the Go-Live. We have created a support center which then holds the customer’s hand throughout their journey for the next five years or decade. We have also ensured that we have a very strong team of people that get involved with the client after the implementation to continually review how they are using the ERP. As the client evolves, we will also work with them to show them areas in which they could further add to the use of the systems.

What are your expansion plans? What is your vision for the company in the medium term, two to three years’ time?

We have a very strong mission to primarily help SMEs grow. We are looking to open offices in the coming months in Rwanda and Uganda to support our growing number of customers in those countries.

We are also looking at opportunities in other regions in Africa and we hope to establish ground presence in some of those countries. We aim to continue to be the leading provider in the region for intelligent ERP. That predominantly involves offering complimentary services to our customers and being involved in projects which include the internet of things, artificial intelligence, etc.

Our aim is to become the customer’s one stop shop. We want to position ourselves to become the customer’s advisor on not just ERP, but also to help them with their business intelligence needs through our analytics company, Cloud and infrastructure needs through Seidor Networks, and also services within the SAP enterprise aspects. We also want to continue to search for the very best local talent which is very crucial for us to ensure that we are able to support our clients properly.