Technology Associates partners Lafarge group Across East Africa, as turn key IT business partner



Bamburi Cements and its subsidiary Hima Cements are members of France head-quartered Lafarge, largest building materials company in the world.  The corporation has a factory in Kasese, Western Uganda , Athi River –Nairobi and Mombassa with a plant capacity of 2.5 + Million  tons  serving the regions of East, Central and Great Lakes region 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. Bamburi  Cements IT infrastructure therefore is immensely critical to the group’s Central Africa business. When selecting an IT vendor Bamburi  Cements wished to engage a reputable, experienced and dependable vendor who brought a comprehensive skillset to become a single point of dependence for the corporations IT needs.

Technology Associates formed a partnership and over the years helped them  restructure their infrastructure to a compelling extent. Servicing six  locations – the plant at Kasese, Regional Head office at Kampala and offices at Tororo,Group HO at Nairobi , Plant s at Mombassa and Athi river near Nairobi ,  covering 450+ desktops and Laptops , 46 Servers, 51 switches and 17 Routers.

Technology Associates entered into a SLA with Bamburi recently and 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.