Sage has announced that Telesure Investment Holdings has deployed Sage X3 across its different brands and subsidiaries. Telesure replaced its Sage Accpac deployment with Sage X3 to improve financial reporting across the organisation.
Time for change
Telesure operates the South African brands of Budget Holdings Ltd, a Guernsey based financial services group. Budget Holdings Ltd also owns brands such as ComparetheMarket in the UK and operations in France, Australia and Turkey. Its South African brands include Auto & General, Dial Direct, First for Women, Budget Insurance and Hippo.co.za.
In 2014 it found that it had outgrown Sage AccPac and looked to replace the solution. Although it had migrated all its brands onto Sage AccPac in 2010, it fell short of its consolidation and financial reporting requirements. It also needed a product that would manage its fixed assets more effectively.
Partner key
Telesure worked with SynergERP to select Sage X3 as its new solution. It is unclear whether this formed part of a competitive tender process or merely a natural upgrade. Telesure had worked with SynergERP, a Sage business partner, for several years. Ryan Ramakers, Financial Manager at Telesure commented: “As a diverse group, we need to be able to consolidate financial reporting across various diverse companies, yet we also need specialised reporting for functions such as underwriting. Sage X3 gives us the efficiency of an integrated system for our entire business, but it also supports the specific needs of our different companies.”
Sage X3 offers Telesure the functionality as well as allowing it to scale inside South Africa and beyond. The ERP solution supports both multi-currency and multi country functionality. The first phase of the project is now complete and financial reporting has been simplified and takes less time to complete than previously. The next phase will be to simplify consolidation reporting. The project has taken more than a year to complete, starting in 2014 and only completing the roll out to the last three companies in 2016.
Its success was due to the close working relationship between Telesure users and SynergERP. Deploying any financial solution needs a time investment from the financial teams that will use the system. Ashley Regenass, CEO at SynergERP, commented: “We were able to deploy Sage X3 relatively quickly because we scoped the project thoroughly and had a deep understanding of Telesure’s business after working together for more than a decade. This project has given Telesure the flexible solution it needs to support its growth well into the future.”
Conclusion
Although this announcement was effectively an upgrade for Sage it is still important. It shows that Sage has the roadmap in place for companies as they grow larger and more complex. For companies investing in one of the lower cost Sage products it shows two things. They can retain relationships with implementation partners beyond the life of their initial accounting solution. Secondly, that Sage has a roadmap of products that they can upgrade with. Keith Fenner, Vice-President Sage Enterprise Africa and Middle East commented: “Sage X3 allows our clients to analyse their critical data in a concise and logical way – giving decision makers a snapshot view of their business, anywhere and anytime.”
By Steve Brooks
