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QAMBAR: Since it’s a greenfield project, the only challenge was how to train the user and keep training them.

One specific requirement we had was for lease and licence because we provide licences to our clients. Oracle told us it could develop this feature for us but it would take time.

"But SAP, with its own module, could make this solution for us within the module itself, with just some fine-tuning, a small development that would not impact the time-frame of our implementation," Qambar continues.

Another important factor was that the various applications the business needed would be integrated already to avoid any unnecessary headaches for the IT team.

"We also wanted a solution that would cover most of our application requirements and it has done that. We realised that integrating applications means the focus really goes off into maintaining those integration points and we did not want to invest our time and effort and money into that area," Murthy explains.

The situation prior to the project was that most data input was done by hand on physical forms and then inputted on Microsoft Office, which meant that data was spread throughout the organisation across departments. Changing this system was the first return on investment for the company, according to Qambar.

"The first thing will be an integrated system. We didn't have a centralised system before so whenever we were looking for information for a particular client, we had to go and check all over the department and all over the organisation - it was difficult!" she says.

"We are seeing a lot of intangible benefits," Murthy adds, "Getting back to the facilities we provide, we are in a position now to track what costs we incur on a particular facility and what revenue we are gaining.

So we are in a much better position now to do cost/benefit analyses on our facilities - which kind of facilities are giving more profitability and which are the products we have that we really need to look into the pricing again because they are not giving us the returns we expect.

And because the implementation was greenfield, the only challenges RAKFTZ has found were the way its data was organised and training the staff for the new system.

"We had two challenges. The first was that we had islands of data so migrating this data to the new system was the biggest task we had in the implementation. It took us around three months just to get our existing data onto the system.

"The other challenge, which is ongoing, is getting the users used to the system because as we said, we didn't have a legacy system, everything was manual, so we need to keep training them and keep them updated," says Qambar.

"The implementation partner didn't have to face too many legacy systems. The only legacy system we had was the accounting, which was a small package, and Microsoft Office. I think any implementation partner can easily give us a format that they can translate from Office.

Since it's a greenfield, the only challenge is how to train the user and keep training them and do more activities in change management," she concludes.

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