A new force has been created in the rapidly growing South African and international SAP service market through the formation of Satreno, which has offices and associate companies in South Africa, Kenya, Ireland the US and Turkey.
Formed from foundations laid by Lejara, which has been servicing the local SAP market since 2003, the new organisation employs around 150 people focusing on SAP-related business intelligence, system integration, supply chain management and learning.
"We are bringing a host of SAP services under a single umbrella, are big enough to run our own implementations and can do end-to-end projects as well as value-added consulting across a wide range of industries," says Satreno CEO, Kurt Lindoor, adding that Satreno can access expert resources from its various regions of operation to bring world best practice to any project in which it is involved.
"Increasingly, multinationals want to use consultants who have proven international expertise, which is something we have in abundance."
Apart from Lejara, other companies making up Satreno include: Optimised Outsourced Solutions, which focuses on the technical side of SAP; Bluestone, which operates from New Jersey in the US; and Alt-Tab, which services the rapidly growing African market from its base in Nairobi, Kenya.
Strengthening Satreno's status in the market is that it has recently been appointed as National Service Partner, SAP Africa.
A core element of Satreno's future focus, says Lindoor, will be on helping organisations to add value to their existing SAP installations.
"SAP is a serious financial commitment for any company or organisation and our aim is to get it to work more efficiently and to add to the overall return on investment. This can be done through optimising the technology backbone, optimising the business intelligence, and optimising the supply chain," adds Lindoor.
Significant SAP opportunities in SA, Africa
"We see our role as helping organisations to get proper value out of SAP. In terms of productivity and return on investment, there is a lot that can be done to improve and maximise value, he says."
While SAP is fairly mature in South Africa, especially in the mining industry, Lindoor believes there is plenty of room to add value to SAP installations throughout the country.
Through its various operations around the world, Satreno has a wide range of SAP experience in several industries, including mining, financial services, pharmaceuticals and petro-chemicals.
Significantly, in South Africa it has consulted to many top companies and organisations such as Sasol, De Beers, BHP-Billiton (Energy Coal South Africa), Anglo Platinum, Xstrata Alloys and the South African Revenue Service.
Although there is significant business potential within South Africa, Satreno is also seeking to tap the growing African market for SAP-related expertise and services. Through its Nairobi-based operation, it has already been involved in projects in Kenya, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and Nigeria.
"There is a lot of infrastructure development taking place in Africa and the World Bank is involved in several projects in which aspects such as corporate governance are extremely important. SAP has a big role to play in Africa, but public and private organisations need to be assisted to extract maximum value and usefulness out of expensive investments that can be underutilised," adds Lindoor.
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