#CIOBreakfastSeries: Sage X3 gains momentum in East Africa

Sage X3, Cloud ERP software by Sage, is rapidly gaining popularity across East Africa. Thanks to a growing customer experience and satisfaction.

Sage X3 was the main topic during a recent CIO Breakfast Series held in Nairobi. The ERP solution is one of a kind. It integrates with all Sage software products such as Sage HRM (for payroll and HRM), Sage Inventory Advisor (cloud based Inventory Optimisation), Sage Intelligence and Sage Enterprise Intelligence for BI and reporting.

“Sage X3 is a business management and HRM solutions for medium to enterprise corporations. We basically help to manage everything in their businesses; whether it is in, manufacturing, agriculture or healthcare, we offer an end to end solution to our customers,” said Ms. Nikki Summers, Regional Director, Sage EA .

Ms. Summers noted that she is a big believer in customers selling to customers. The reasoning behind the strategy is that it’s easier to believe your own peers over a sales person.

“I’m willing to get you in touch with our customers, if you are interested in getting to learn about our product further,” added Ms. Summers, with a certainty.

The strategy seems to be working, as according to Ms. Summers:

“In sage East Africa, we’ve had a lot of successes over the last year. We have over 30 enterprise customers, many of those being in the agriculture, financial and services sectors. We are making great traction in the market, and I believe that sage has the right solutions for the region.”

Customers selling to customers                  

During a panel session at the event, Sage brought together a current customer and a potential client; to show the audience in attendance what kind of interaction usually takes place.

Edgar Mabhiza, Country Manager, Alliance Media Group, a company that has been using Sage for close to three years; was introduced to Michael Michie, head of IT, M Oriental bank Kenya, who are looking to implement the solution.

Mabhiza said that Alliance Media started using Sage X 3 because of the challenges they faced while operating in multiple countries. The challenges included language barriers, multiple currencies, multiple databases, real-time reports, legislative requirements and connectivity.

Alliance Media was able to solve these challenges by implementing Sage X3, as it is a: web based, multi-company, multi-site, multi-user, multi-legislation and multi-currency solutions that runs on a single database across the whole organization.

“This allows anyone across the continent to have one single version of the truth at any given time. The users can access our solution on any web browser, on any platform and device that they are using,” added Mabhiza.

Michie noted that his interactions with other Sage X3 users, with great testimonials such as Mabhiza, allowed him to understand the product better and helped M Oriental make the decision of getting the product.

He explained, “Our key driver towards Sage X3 was mostly on automated management of staff and also being able to measure KPIs and to get a better understanding of staff weaknesses; and how to sort out the issues of staff weaknesses and leverage on staff strengths,”

“As a corporate bank we leverage heavily on our staff doing a lot for our customers, so we require a very strong and capable workforce, the Sage X3 platform looked the best which would present us with a single view of all our staff needs, strengths and weaknesses so as to grow them,” Michie continued.

What is Sage X3?

According Michael Rasagu, Enterprise Sales Leader at Sage Africa for EA Region, Sage X3 has the ability revolutionise the way work is done, because of its features which include:

• Fully web-based, mobile responsive and easy-to-use software solution
• Supports multiple legislations, languages ​​and currencies
• Multi-company, multi-site with inter-company processes
• Reporting & fully integrated Business Intelligence with graphical business processes and workflow functionality

“Sage X3 gives you the power to work from anywhere, and the ability to work from any device. It’s a complete suite that allows you to do your operations end to end, without having to integrate with other third parties,” Rasagu added.

Meet Pegg and other innovations around Sage X 3

The company continues to innovate around Sage X 3, in a bid to make it better and easier to use. The audience was introduced to Pegg, an accounting chatbot that helps in managing money, during the breakfast.

“Other than the chatbot, we’ve done a lot of other integration with the system. We have brought in the Business Intelligence (BI) element of it, where you are able to pull out dashboards and reports in real time. We have also integrated with biometrics time entry tools as well warehouse devices that allow you to scan and the data goes directly to the system,” Rasagu concluded.

Click here to learn more about Sage Africa.