Business Chat with Stuart Scanlon from epic ERP

Data and how it is used to create better business was the key topic of our business Chat with Stuart Scanlon, MD at epic ERP.

African businesses are under pressure but have also amazing resilience, and we unpacked a bit of how that looks in our discussion today.

Key Quotes from Stuart:

“The one part about doing business in Africa is resilience. Africa seems to, you know, it falls and trips a little bit, but they always get up, and then they seem to come back stronger and just keep going. And I think it’s just the sheer nature of the entrepreneurial nature within Africa”.

“If you sit back and go, OK, you’ve got to keep an eye on what’s the objective? Where are the customers? Where’s your base? What is your offering? And if it’s relevant, and that’s really kind of a view on it – I think definitely challenging times, but with that comes opportunity”.

Good ERP Systems are not about the features

“10, 15 years ago maybe, you would sell these systems on features, and everyone was trying to add a new feature and beat it out, et cetera. I think the realization that happened some time back is that it’s not the features, but it’s the data”.

Understanding your business value proposition

“it’s understanding your value proposition and where you’re making money, where you’re losing money, because sometimes a loss-leading product is going to help you sort of grow your other markets where you’ve got bigger opportunity”.

“There’s a big trend towards putting on all these intelligence layers on top of it and giving you sort of structured data that’s real-time. Then you can make decisions based on what you can see in front of you”.

“That’s where I think Africa will win if they can start thinking like running it like a business and understanding what’s going on on the ground”.