California, USA. Fort McMurray, Canada. Cape Town, South Africa. These geographic locations share an unfortunate common denominator: Fire. The brutal nature of fire has never been more evident as recent times, when South Africans watched the Mother City being ravaged by flames and covered in an ominous blanket of smoke.
A recent report noted that firefighters battled 106 blazes in and around Cape Town within a single day. The fires included a devastating mountain fire in Somerset West, which saw more than 120 firefighters, 12 fire engines and 10 water tankers battle the blaze on the slopes of the Helderberg Mountain.
Effective fire management and risk mitigation is a complex affair. It requires streamlined, strategic integration between all company processes to ensure that multiple global operations can be managed simply and conveniently, from a single platform and with little human intervention in day-to-day activities.
Kishugu, a global Integrated Fire Management Services leader and implementer of the award-winning South African Government’s Working on Fire (WoF) programme, needed to migrate to a solution which would support all operations across the entire business.
“The lack of real-time integration between all company processes in the group, the need for human intervention in day-to-day processes, a multi-vendor landscape and a solution stack that did not support future scalability necessitated the group migrating the company-wide processes to a platform that would eliminate these gaps,” says Kishugu’s Head of Corporate Communication, Naranda Leeuwner.
In addition to digitally transforming their business, Kishugu anticipated a future initial public offering (IPO). In preparation of an IPO, Kishugu would require business process automation, to support the regulatory and compliance requirements of a public company. Further requirements included that the solution be extended to resources in the field, through mobile applications and incorporate Internet of Things (IoT) to enhance predictability and customer services offerings.
There was only one solution that was able to meet their needs: SAP S/4 HANA. It offers a single platform to manage and support multiple global business operations, which includes the management of professional services, training services, manufacturing, logistics and fleet services, among others. SAP S/4HANA also allows for the addition of new business units and revenue streams, it connects all staff members across the business with their processes in real time, reduces manual intervention, and includes predictive analytics capabilities.
“SAP S/4 HANA not only manages core business processes, the solution can also be extended to incorporate future mobile users and stakeholders,” says Pankaj Bhula, S/4 HANA Market Unit Lead, SAP Africa. “This creates a collaboration platform which supports services organisations to excel at what they do, such as Kishugu’s critical services, thereby saving lives and protecting our sensitive ecosystems.”
Kishugu was introduced to SAP S/4HANA by its partner, G3G South Africa. G3G itself is a multi-national SAP Partner which themselves run on S/4HANA. G3G demonstrated to the Kishugu team how they could address some of the challenges they face on a daily basis, utilising their own installation as well as similar implementations deployed by the team internationally. As such, they were able to guide Kishugu through the processes and solutions which would suit their business best.
Combining the skills and experience of the local and global teams, G3G hosts S/4HANA in the cloud, which will enable Kishugu employees to access the system wherever they are and on whichever device they prefer, be it laptop, tablet or mobile phones.
“We are excited to implement SAP as it is an excellent tool to streamline processes. It will assist us in taking our business to new heights. Kishugu strives towards excellence and quality throughout all our operations, and SAP will help us achieve this goal,” said COO of Kishugu, George Slabbert.
What is so critical about the solution for an organisation such as Kishugu is its ability to simplify processes in a scalable and efficient manner. “SAP S/4 HANA’s capability to run live business in this new digital transformation era enables Kishugu to supports the real time flow of information and transactions content between the several companies in the group. As a result, this live data is now ensuring that field-users and back-office processes are more closely aligned” concludes Bhula.