24 x7 data centre infrastructure for Sub Sahara Africa’s first iBaan e-Commerce implementation at Regional leader, Bidco Oil Refineries.

Bidco Oil Refineries is amongst East Africa's leading producers of refined cooking oil, butter and soap. Being the earliest to understand the benefits and business impact IT would provide in this competitive industry, Bidco Oil embarked on a major IT investment in 1999. Bidco Oil is a constant winner of the COYA and Kenya Institute of Management awards, particularly for best practices in IT and their dynamic CEO, Vimal Shah is consistently among the top 5 CEO’s polled by the PwC every year.

To further their competitiveness and leadership in the market, Bidco keenly followed us up on an initial proposal to automate and implement a distribution management solution to extensively track their region-wide sales, inventory and consumption analysis.

The engagement resulted in Bidco’s comprehensive review of their IT system and went onto build Africa's first E - Commerce solution on a Baan/Microsoft platform. The resulting iBaaN implementation became the first BaaN e-Commerce deployment in Sub Sahara Africa.  The solution offers Bidco’s distribution partners, the ability to process and manage the procurement of Bidco's products across 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. Technology Associates would then 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.

Building a successfully redundant e-Commerce solution and achieve a near 100% uptime environment for this mission-critical 24 hours, 7 day system, Technology Associates Kenya deployed a highly redundant fail-over Cluster solution based on HP's world leading fibre cluster storage system and the Microsoft Advance Server 2000 platform. 

It was mandatory to cluster the existing Baan 4c3 application and the MS SQL Server 7.0 on the Windows NT Enterprise platform. HP’s leading Proliant DL 580R series' six 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 HP 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.

The Cluster was successfully tested with HP Cluster Verification Utility and HP Redundancy Manager. Furthermore each server had two (2) dual port network cards to provide fault tolerance through Network Card Teaming.

E-Sales/E-Procurement and the E-database servers were setup as per BAAN E-Applications setup procedure taking into account the hardware fault tolerance capabilities. All these servers were setup with RAID 1 configurations, redundant Hot Plug Power supply, Redundant network interfaces for teaming purposes. These servers were setup in their own Network separate from the Local LAN. The traffic expected between the two (2) network segments is between the SQL servers in the DMZ and the backend BAAN SQL database. Every time an order is raised through the E-Sales application it generates E-mail to the sales team at Bidco of the Purchase order.

Cisco’s firewall solutions were configured with Access-lists and IDS software to allow for the demarcation of the networks into three (3) distinct networks thereby providing security to Bidco’s internal network from the outside world.

Bidco reposed their confidence in us to migrate their enterprise onto the Microsoft Active Directory architecture, providing a homogenous, manageable, secure and scalable infrastructure. Bidco Oil became the first site in the sub-sahara region to deploy Microsoft's comprehensive suite of Commerce & Platform Server systems. One of the earliest users of VSAT technology in East Africa, Bidco implemented a high speed networking infrastructure linking their manufacturing plant in Thika to their sales and regional warehouses in Nairobi and Nakuru respectively.

With compelling presence in Tanzania and Uganda, all depending upon their centralized IT processing centre in Thika, Kenya Bidco’s e-Business is real and kicking and are well on progress to realize their vision to become an Africa-wide player