AfCFTA: Is your ERP ready?

Opening a subsidiary in Dakar or Nairobi takes a few months. Getting accounting, inventory, payroll and customer data to follow often takes far longer. For Sidney N'ZI, that is where an expansion succeeds or fails.

Sidney N'ZI has worked in the IT departments of Allianz's Africa holding and AGL. He is now Digital Transformation Manager at TechWise Solutions, a digital services company, and Senior IT Project Manager at a financial group operating across the continent.

"Systems designed for national borders"

With AfCFTA, more and more companies are expanding across several African countries. Are their information systems keeping up?

Many companies on our continent are growing much faster than their information systems. They operate in several countries but often keep managing their data, processes and tools in silos: each subsidiary on its own, independently, with a range of different tools. Yet AfCFTA calls for interoperability, standardisation and a consolidated, continent-wide view. Put simply, we won't build a continental market with systems designed for national borders.

One ERP or many? Neither

One ERP for the whole group, or one per country? The real answer lies elsewhere.

When a group operates in several countries, how does it organise its ERP?

There is no single model that works from one group to the next. That said, most pan-African groups today take a hybrid approach: a single group ERP, a shared data repository, standardised operational processes, and a few local adaptations where regulation requires them. In my experience, the best ERP isn't the one that makes everything uniform, but the one that standardises what creates value and localises what regulators impose.

"The best ERP isn't the one that makes everything uniform, but the one that standardises what creates value and localises what regulators impose."

When governments want data kept at home

Business wants one unified system, governments want data to stay on their soil. How do companies handle that tension?

It's one of the major challenges of digital transformation in Africa. In West and Central Africa in particular, companies generally address it through distributed architectures. For example, each subsidiary keeps its customer database and personal data in its own country, to meet sovereignty requirements. The data needed to steer the group, however, such as financial, commercial or operational indicators, is synchronised to a central platform through APIs or secure integration mechanisms. The ERP is then no longer necessarily centralised: it's the information that is federated. The challenge is to ensure a single view of the company without needlessly moving sensitive data.

This is the crux of it. For years, companies assumed they had to choose between group-wide unity and local law. Federated information breaks that false choice: data sovereignty becomes a design decision, not a brake on growth.

Compliance from day one

Data protection laws are multiplying across the continent. Have you seen them change architectures mid-project?

It happens sometimes, and that is precisely why compliance should never come at the end of a project. When data localisation, transfer or protection requirements surface late, they can call the hosting, the interfaces or certain data flows into question. For a project manager, the risk is significant: a technically excellent architecture can become obsolete if it isn't compliant in the countries concerned. In a multi-country project, regulatory constraints must therefore be identified at the scoping stage.

For the user, one question: does it work?

In practical terms, what difference does it make to a user in Lagos or Nairobi where the ERP runs?

For the user, it all comes down to response time, availability and service continuity. The further away the infrastructure is, or the more it depends on international connections, the more network quality can affect response times and availability. Depending on the country and the type of data processed, the choice of hosting can also have implications for compliance, data access and business continuity. But a user in Lagos or Nairobi shouldn't have to worry about the architecture chosen. The right choice is precisely the one that makes those constraints invisible to them, while remaining compliant and resilient.

A boardroom decision, not just an IT one

Is choosing where to host a technical decision or a management decision?

I see it as a management decision informed by technology. IT has to set out the different scenarios objectively: performance, security, availability, cost, reversibility, compliance, data location and business continuity. But the final choice commits the company to operational, regulatory and strategic risks. IT's role is to make the trade-offs clear to management. Technology determines what is possible, but governance decides which risks are acceptable.

"Technology determines what is possible, but governance decides which risks are acceptable."

What happens when that decision is put off?

Putting off the decision doesn't remove the risk. It simply means accepting that circumstances will decide for us later. The problem can surface during an audit, a regulatory change, an infrastructure outage or the opening of a subsidiary in a new country. The company then acts in a rush rather than with a controlled architecture. Many postpone these decisions in the name of "agility". Yet some decisions cost little when made upfront, and become extremely complex to fix after deployment.

The warning applies to companies of every size. Agility lets you adjust a product along the way. It won't let you move data hosted in the wrong country without paying the price.

Before you cross the border

An SME opening in its second country doesn't have a large group's resources. Sidney N'ZI's advice: don't copy the big players, borrow their principles. Standardise core data and processes, and choose tools that can grow with the business, factoring in the second country's constraints before deployment. For any leader preparing to expand, he suggests three questions to ask about their ERP:

1. Can my ERP absorb the new country's rules without undermining my current model? Tax, regulation, currency, language, reporting and local processes.
2. Where will my data be, and do I have the legal and operational right to use it this way? It's a compliance question, but also one of risk control.
3. What happens if the connection, the cloud or the central system goes down? This question forces a hard look at how resilient the architecture really is.

"Before crossing a border commercially, a company should check that its information system can cross it too; unfortunately, the opposite is usually the case."

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