One of the Largest Providers of SAP Solutions in East Africa Discusses the Sector, Competition and Key Focus for the Company

Interview with Francis Njiraini, Director of Bluekey Seidor

What is your assessment of the sector in Kenya? What are the latest trends? Is the sector competitive?

The ICT sector in Kenya is a changing and dynamic industry. The main reason for this is that Kenyans and the Kenyan businesspeople are very open to new technology. That has helped us to progress to the next stage. Some of the new technologies that have come through are the Cloud and mobility, the internet of things or IOT, machine learning, conversational AI, and new platforms like SAP HANA.

These new technologies help give the sector an intelligent ERP where we are able to give companies a solution that can help them to create visual stories to identify what the key drivers are to their results. If your company is growing, what is driving that growth? If your company is not growing, what is causing that? It also helps to identify key trends in the business. In one company we went to, we found that one customer would only buy during the first week of the month and we were able to channel our resources and our team to realize that there was no need to contact that customer until the first week of the month. We use machine learning to identify those trends and insights. In conversational artificial intelligence, what if you had the ability to talk to computers and ask questions in your own natural language?

SAP Analytics Cloud allows you to ask questions normally and it will give you a result. You can ask, “why are my margins low?” and the system will automatically give you results using analytics. Another thing that we have seen is that people want convenience, which is what the new technology gives us. People now expect to be able to book their ticket online, pay online, and even to do their boarding passes online. We can provide the same convenience for businesses.

With mobility solution and Cloud, for example, the customer can be in the field and the sales team can take orders. I can sit here and talk to you and if you like a product, I can make a sale, and generate all the documentation required in the field. We see a lot of Kenyan business owners who own multiple companies and they travel a lot to different parts of the world. With the SAP Analytics Cloud, they can see what is happening in their organization with information and performance from wherever they are in the world in real time. With that convenience, you do not need to be in the office anymore to know what is going on with your company.

The biggest thing for us as a company is that we try to offer convenience so that as a CEO or owner of a business, you have the liberty to travel and be wherever you need to be and have the information you need to be able to make a decision at anytime with this service because a decision may be required of you even if you are travelling. That is critical. We have seen Kenya adapt to those new technologies. A lot of differentiation is coming in because people are so open to new ideas here.

What is your key focus as a company?

Our key focus is SMEs. We offer services to grow SMEs. In Kenya, most of the economy is driven by the SMEs. Almost 80% of all people are employed by SMEs. When we give solutions to SMEs, we know we are having a direct contribution to the economy. 2019 was a challenging year in Kenya.

We have had a tight cash flow from the government and the private sector which means that for you to run your business, you need to be more aware of the cost of what is happening in your organization. That is how our solution helps. As you run your organization, we can give you the visibility of where to cut costs. If a company can identify the areas that will help it grow, they will retain their employees and that means that more families will have a better life. In that way, we contribute to the welfare of the economy.

We are very happy with the team and what we have done and we have been recognized. For the sixth year running, we have been nominated for the Top 100 KPMG Award. We are very proud of that. This shows that the market is recognizing our efforts. On the talent front, SAP has been running something called SAP Skills for Africa to train young people and graduates. Getting the right talent is a big problem for us. We are partnering with SAP for the academy and those recruits will become interns in our organization so they can start a career. We are ensuring that there is a pool of resources available for the team.

What is your projection for next year and the future?

2019 was difficult, but we are very optimistic for 2020. Customers are committing to new projects. In 2019, people would like our product but they would not commit to the project. For them to commit for 2020 gives us hope for the market. We expect to see a lot of growth coming.