African enterprise excellence in digital transformation celebrated at SAP quality awards for customer success

NAIROBI, Kenya -/African Media Agency(AMA)/- After a year of unprecedented digitisation of services and business models due to the pandemic, the SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success returned to celebrate African enterprises’ efforts at adopting digital technologies and attaining Intelligent Enterprise capabilities.

Nazia Pillay, Head of Customer Success Office Africa at SAP, says: “The past 18 month period has been the single greatest accelerator of digital transformation, as organisations increase their investment in digital technologies to attain greater agility and improve their response to the disruption caused by the pandemic. The organisations recognised at this year’s SAP Quality Awards for Customer Success represent the very best in African enterprise excellence in adopting digital technologies for competitive advantage.” The SAP Quality Awards, which has been held since 2005, recognises companies that have excelled in their use of SAP technologies to achieve key business outcomes. After a hiatus in 2020 due to the pandemic, the Quality Awards returned this year to recognise the outstanding achievements of 20 African enterprises from East, West and Southern Africa.

Entries were judged in four distinct categories, namely Rapid Time to Value, Business Transformation, S/4Move, and Public Cloud. Overall winners at this year’s awards include Lenmed, supported by implementation partner Gijima, who took top honours in the Rapid Time to Value category. Capitec Bank claimed the Business Transformation crown with support from SAP Services, while Dangote Cement won the S/4Move award. The Public Cloud category was won by retailer Shoprite Checkers, with support from SAP Services.

Bethany Pietersen, Group Business Technology Manager at Lenmed, says: “By focusing on standardisation and following a strict governance framework, we were able to have no additional developments and could onboard a new hospital without any disruption to its operations.” Werner Carstens, Solutions Architect at Capitec Bank says the vision of their SAP project was to build a high-performance support service capability that could scale to accommodate future growth. “The buy-in from our executive team and support from our key business stakeholders, combined with a dedicated project team enabled a successful implementation.” According to Meredith Allan, Customer Rewards and Data Manager at Shoprite Checkers, their project was aimed at making Shoprite a more customer-centric business. “More than 50 systems were impacted during the implementation, and we had to train more than 77 000 till operators across in our stores. Thanks to a committed and skilled project team, we were able to successfully implement our project and sign up more than 17 million customers to our new customer rewards programme.” Juzar Badami, Group Head SAP Centre of Excellence at Dangote Cement says: “We wanted to reduce our total cost of ownership across our SAP landscape, with our operations across 10 countries affected. We have achieved an average response time 50% quicker than our legacy system and boost our system performance ten-fold, all while lowering our total cost of ownership by more than 20%.” Cathy Smith, Managing Director at SAP Africa, says the outstanding quality of entries this year indicate a welcome trend of digitisation and innovation among African enterprises. “The sheer scale at which most organisations have had to adapt over the past 18 months has posed enormous challenges to business and IT leaders. Encouragingly, African enterprises have met these challenges head on, putting innovation and technical expertise to work, drawing on the support of a healthy and growing ecosystem of implementation partners to build greater resilience and transform their business processes. We look forward to continuing our close partnership with the continent’s leading businesses.”

The full winners list consists of:

Rapid Time to Value:

• Winner: Lenmed (supported by Gijima)
• Finalists: Kiara Health
• Agência Nacional de Petróleo, Gás
• National Social Security Fund
• Swiss Pharma Nigeria
• Vivo Energy Investments

Business Transformation:

• Winner: Capitec Bank (supported by SAP Services)
• Finalists: Life Healthcare Group
• Ariosh
• Dangote Industries
• Gauteng Department of Health
• South African National Roads Agency

S/4Move:

• Winner: Dangote Cement
• Finalists: Kenafric Industries
• Nampower
• Sasol South Africa

Public Cloud:

• Winner: Shoprite Checkers (supported by SAP Services)
• Finalists: Crystal Ventures
• FS Systems International
• Masstores

Distributed by African Media Agency (AMA) on behalf of SAP Africa.

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