Masana Petroleum Solutions, South Africa's only black-owned and managed provider of lubricant and fuel solutions to commerce and industry, has used SAP Business One to free-up operational savings and give the company technology independence from founder company and shareholder, British Petroleum (BP).
Says Masana Petroleum Solutions financial director, Kholeka Mzondeki: "Born out of the BP stable as a black empowerment deal, Masana initially used BP's technology systems to manage its own back-office.
"It was not an ideal situation because BP's business dealings, as part of an international conglomerate, were more complex than ours so their system didn't particularly suit the much more niched, personalised, and adaptable approach we needed to take to our market.
"It was important, brand-wise, for us not only to be seen to be independent of BP but to actually have decision-making control over our own data.
"As we were also outsourcing our IT infrastructure and SAP software support to Faritec by way of keeping our operations as lean and focused as possible, we decided to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system at the same time. We went with SAP Business One because we were growing at more than 20% year on year and the solution is extremely scalable. It was also affordable."
Ebrahim Hanslo, SAP South Africa channel and solutions manager for SAP Business One, says that the Masana implementation ended up being a great rather than merely a good one. "At the time of the planning of the implementation, November 2006, SAP Business One was relatively new to the market - as were Faritec and Masana. So the implementation could have been quite risky. Due to input from all sides that was both fresh and diverse as well as extremely focused on reinforcing the competitive edge Masana's BEE status gave the company, the implementation came in on time, and met every single requirement."
Faritec's Riaz Hamiid agrees. "Because of SAP Business One's flexibility and the range and power of its various modules, it was a perfect fit for Masana and we needed to customise it only in relation to the complexities of the fuel and lubricants industry, in terms of pricing and discounts.
"Also, SAP Business One integrates very easily with third party solutions, so Masana's FuelMaster technology is able to invoice SAP Business One automatically - making Masana's administration at all levels much easier."
Mzondeki says that operational savings arising from Masana's overall information technology changes, including the outsourcing of the contact centre and general infrastructure to Faritec, will be in the order of millions of Rand.
Many of our other customers are on SAP solutions, creating integration possibilities by adding to seamless customer service from point of order to payment fulfilment.
"From a financial perspective, SAP Business One has massively improved our reporting. I'm particularly pleased with the ability it gives me to be pro-active in configuring reports myself and not having to ask our IT department to configure them for me. I feel more in control.
"In fact, SAP Business One's impact on the company is pretty pervasive. Of 60 employees, 55 are SAP users - and almost 99% of our sales organisation uses the solution to drive customer relationships and manage orders.
"SAP Business One is a pleasure for us all."
Future exploitation of SAP Business One by Masana will include automation of procurement and billing - integrating that functionality with supplier and customer systems - and extension of the solution's built-in e-commerce capabilities.
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