Technology Associates Uganda partners Lafarge group holding Hima Cements, as turn key IT business partner.

Hima Cements, Uganda became a fully owned subsidiary of Bamburi Cement in 1999 and with that a member of Lafarge, the largest building materials company in the world.  The corporation has a factory in Kasese, Western Uganda with a plant capacity of 240,000 tonnes and together with Bamburi, Mombasa and Athi River have a production capacity of 2.4 million tones serving the East, Central and Great Lakes regions of Africa, including Reunion, Uganda, Mayotle Mauritius, Sri Lanka, the Comoros, Madagascar, Seychelles and the Congo.

The East African operations of the group run a centralized SAP system off the Oracle platform of a high-availability HP Windows 2003 server farm and run Lotus Notes as the enterprise messaging environment. Each plant unit runs the Maximo mission-critical and 24x7 plant maintenance application as well as Prodis applications at the local level. Hima Cements’ IT infrastructure therefore is immensely critical to the group’s Central Africa business. When selecting an IT vendor Hima Cements wished to engage a reputable, experienced and dependable vendor who brought a comprehensive skill set to become a single point of dependence for the corporations IT needs. Technology Associates Uganda formed that partnership and over the years helped Hima Cements restructure their infrastructure to a compelling extent. Servicing three locations – the plant at Kasese, Head office at Kampala and offices at Tororo, covering 300 desktops, 25 Servers, Technology Associates entered into a SLA with Hima for the past two years. Through the implementation of an on-site HelpDesk for logging, escalating and reporting on service events upon stringent measurements, we have consistently delivered value to the company’s operations.

In 2004, the group revamped their Local and Wide Area Data networks and once again contracted Technology Associates to deploy a Gigabit CiscoCatalyst infrastructure across all their operations. The solution formed the critical foundation for the group’s regional data and voice network based on a meshed VSAT communication infrastructure to manage the group’s integrated mail, messaging, voice and SAP processing platforms. In the same year, Hima took advantage of a valuable proposal from Technology Associates to deploy a Cisco Linksys Wireless LAN at their head offices in Kampala. The year also saw a major investment in high-end HP DL 580 servers and a few hundred desktops through Technology Associates that became the basis of a Windows 2003 migration project to offer Hima’s end users the latest technology infrastructure