Africa opens up opportunity for ERP vendors
Hesham El Komy, Senior Director, International Channels at Epicor

Africa opens up opportunity for ERP vendors

Intelligent CIO caught up with Epicor’s Senior Director International Channels, Hesham El Komy, at GITEX to discuss the African ERP market and the impact of Industry 4.0.

Q: What is Epicor’s main focus for GITEX this year?
A:
I think it’s important for Epicor to be here this week. We’ve made some fundamental changes in the region over the past 12 months including the introduction of a new channel programme. There has been an increase of business with various channels across the Middle East and North Africa and so really it’s for us to compound what we’ve done over the past 12 months.

Q: How is Epicor adapting its ERP solutions for the introduction of VAT in the Middle East?
A:
The introduction of VAT in the Middle East was a shock for everybody when it first came about but we were very quick to adapt and the reality is most countries in the world have a VAT programme. For us to be able to take the solution pack from somewhere else and tailor it from the Middle East market was fairly straightforward. Obviously we have to make sure that we did that in conjunction with local authorities as well as local partners who had a better understanding of the nuances of VAT in this region. We have adapted, we are ready to go. We’re highlighting it this week and a few of the partners that are here have already adopted the VAT path and they have started introducing that to their customers.

Q: Epicor recently acquired a new distributor in South Africa; what are your plans for expansion across the region?
A:
Africa tends to be one of those regions that is neglected by a lot of the major players in the IT world, a lot of them dabble but no one really goes full throttle over there. When doing markets analysis a couple of years ago for the territory we could see that there are a lot countries there, a lot of World Bank investment as well as the ability to innovate because they’ve had to. They’re effectively moving from third world countries to the emerging economies.

It’s that shift into the emerging economies that’s really opened up an opportunity there for ERP vendors such as ourselves. We’re going in full throttle, big focus on the likes of East Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, and then obviously South Africa, and entering into the likes of Namibia, Uganda, and Zambia. We’ve just appointed our first distributor in South Africa.

The distributor has a history with Epicor, so a lot of the people working there, including management, have experienced Epicor over their career in various guises, whether they worked for Epicor in the past, whether they came from other resellers in the past. They’ve all formed together and come under the umbrella now of an organisation called Epic ERP. Between them they’ve got over a hundred years of Epicor experience, and that’s just at management level.

The ramp up has been very quick, we signed that three months ago now. We’ve already recruited the first two partners, we’ve already closed our first couple of pieces of business. We are expecting a very big impact.

The demand is definitely there. The pipeline across southern Africa has grown very quickly in the past few months. The interest from partners has grown very rapidly. I see Africa as a fundamental growth market, or a growth engine you can even say, for the Middle East and Africa territory. Africa is a solid bet for potential growth over the next two or three years.

Q: How do you currently view the African market?
A:
The politics in Africa are currently as stable as they have been for a very long time, how long that remains, it’s hard to tell. I mentioned Tanzania as a huge growth market. They’re facing huge economic difficulties and the government there is currently under review for some potential foul play, same as in South Africa. The interesting thing there is that hasn’t seemed to affect the aggressiveness or the want to grow for the organisations.

We’re talking about local organisations, they’re not necessarily multinationals setting up in Africa, we’re talking about local African organisations setting up and growing multi-digit growth quarter on quarter year-on-year. It’s those organisations that are immediately in the market for ERP, they’re going from a very small warehouse to major factories in a matter of years, they need to be prepared for that, they need to start looking at Industry 4.0.

Our response to that is we are building the proper ecosystem there to ensure that implementation can continue, sales can continue, with or without our direct presence being there. We’re catering for them and catering for the fact that we don’t know what’s around the corner with regards to politics.

Q: How is Industry 4.0 is changing ERP?
A:
It’s a big change, I was in Hong Kong recently and I met with a organisation called the Hong Kong Productivity Council. Their classes are Industry 4.0 leaders across North Asia and they’ve actually abducted one of our products to showcase in their counsel and offices. It’s a big warehouse basically where they’ve gone from fully automated machinery, to robots, to 3D printing but 3D printing of all kinds, and it’s all being managed now by ERP systems as well as machine automating systems, which is one of the other products that we provide.

What we’re seeing from standard industries and standard manufacturing is that Industry 4.0 is going to speed up the manufacturing process, and is going to give the flexibility within the manufacturing process from hundreds and thousands of units of the same product to hundreds of thousands of units to tailored products; something that just hasn’t been done in the past because machines weren’t clever enough for that. With Industry 4.0 I think we’ll see that shift.

And ERP is a central part of Industry 4.0. Without a modern ERP system in place, you’re not going to succeed in industry.

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