CLIENT SUCCESS STORIES

The Customer - BIDCO OIL REFINERIES LTD

Our customer, Bidco Oil Refineries are among East Africa's leading producers of refined cooking oil, butter and soap. A dominant player in the FMCG sector in the region was among the first quality certified ISO 9001 companies in the sector, laying severe emphasis in efficiency and control in their operational processes. Being among the earliest to understand the benefits and impact Information Technology would provide in their competitiveness in this growing industry, Bidco Oil embarked on a major IT investment in 1999 implementing the entire suite of Baan 4c3 Enterprise wide resource automation and planning solution at their Thika plant. The application completely automates the company's financials, inventory, production and provides an exhaustive MIS and operational intelligence reports in a 24 x 7 environment. One of the earliest users of VSAT technology in East Africa, Bidco maintained a continuous link between their manufacturing plant in Thika and the sales and regional warehouses in Nairobi and Nakuru respectively.

The Challenge

To further their competitiveness and leadership in the market, Bidco keenly followed up an initial proposal to automate and implement a "Distribution Management" solution from ComputerPoint to extensively track their region-wide sales, inventory and consumption analysis, to build Africa's first E - Commerce solution on a Baan/Microsoft platform driving a decision to implement Baan's E Commerce Sales and Procurement modules atop their ERP platform.

The scope of the solution would then offer Bidco and their distribution partners the ability to process and manage the procurement of Bidco's products across the country (and eventually the region) absolutely on-line. The solution will eventually integrate EDI and other payment gateways to accomplish complete "e-fulfillment of the Supply Chain" in a B2C market place.

To further facilitate this initiative, ComputerPoint would then be required to deploy the Tally Distribution management solution across every Bidco wholesaler in the region in an attempt to deploy a B2B automation of the Sales order processing, Sales and Consumption tracking, Re-order level and Stock management across their region-wide infrastructure of Wholesaler and Distributor partner network, while providing a comprehensive financial and inventory management solution for the Partner's independent business.

The Solution

To build a successful E-Commerce solution, it was paramount that a highly available, fail-safe infrastructure needed to be built. It was mandatory to cluster the existing Baan 4c3 application and the MS SQL Server 7.0 on the Windows NT Enterprise platform.

To achieve a near 100% uptime environment for this mission-critical 24 hours, 7 day system, ComputerPoint proposed a Highly redundant fail-over Cluster solution based on Compaq's world leading fibre cluster storage system and the Microsoft Advance Server 2000 platform. Bidco Oil will also be the first site in the sub-saharan region to deploy Microsoft's comprehensive suite of Commerce Server, ISA Server, Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server and SQL Server 2000 of enterprise platform systems.

Compaq's world leading rack-mountable servers provided the standard platform to integrate the proposed redundant cluster. The servers would host the Network File print services, Web services, Applications RDBMS and the E-Sales and E-procurement applications. This array of servers will fail over an external Compaq 4100 Raid array storage system. The cluster configuration used was HAF 200, which is a No Single Point of Failure design. The design entailed a 3-tier network where the backend cluster is to integrate into the LAN. The E-Sales/E-Procurement/E-Database and Web servers were to be located in a Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The Domain controller was a Windows 2000 server running Exchange 2000 servicing the organization-wide messaging system.

Business Benefits

Bidco-Oil are well on their way to become an African player. With their recent acquisition of a major Oil and Fat refiner in Tanzania who also have a VSAT link-into the iBaan Server at Thika, Bidco’s eBusiness is real and kicking. Better control on production and near just-in-time inventory management, while controlling sales per product item per region per beat per sales man. Besides obviously setting pace for the business transaction of the future.