Oracle in South Africa

South African Tourism today announced the successful implementation of Oracle’s e-Business Suite special edition; this edition is a business applications suite designed specifically for companies of ten to 500 employees. Implementation is managed by Navigor, EOH’s Oracle business unit, and carries a price tag of 2 million rands.

The group’s financial management information had, until the implementation, manually consolidated, an unimaginably time-consuming and error-laden process Headquartered in Sandton, South African Tourism has offices in the Australia, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States. Identifying gaps in its system integration, SAT chose to perform a thorough needs analysis among its 130 international users to identify further areas for improvement. “This provided us with an excessive wish list,” said SAT financial manager Mogale Maloma.”

Maloma went on to say that, in their consultations with other tourism organizations, the best advice on implementation came from Australia, as that nation’s tourist board had similar needs. “We also consulted with other tour- ism organisations seeking best practice and found Tourism Australia very similar to South Africa, with almost the same requirements.” After a formal tender process, SAT selected Oracle and implementation partner Navigor to settle a number of business and technological goals including compliance with company governance requirements, standardization of the information-technology infrastructure, improvement to client service delivery, scalability, and implementation of an HR management system – in other words, the works.

Essentially, ultimately “The HR department was able to focus on macro issues as opposed to micro, which made a big difference to them,” said Navigor MD Kevin Lubbe. Additional work with SAT will be done that promises to provide more automation and improved payroll, project management and CRM systems.