Partner: Egyptian CPAs (ECPA)
Date: 23/04/2020
Mr. Ashraf Hagar, General Manager
To listen to the full interview, please play the video below:
- Editor: Peace be upon you.
Mr. Ashraf: And upon you be peace.
We would like to conduct an interview with you to learn your opinion of Nama ERP and to gather some information.
You are very welcome.
- Editor: What exactly does your firm do?
Mr. Ashraf: We are, in origin, an accounting, auditing, tax and financial consulting firm. In accounting, auditing and tax we work like any other audit firm; that is a routine and well-understood practice. Our financial consulting, however, is a somewhat unusual speciality: it is financial consulting in the field of business development. Business development is a broad field, and we specialise in a single axis of it, namely “financial and administrative business development”. What we mean by that is establishing a framework for the financial and administrative work inside the organisation that guarantees the decision maker can measure at the right time and at the right cost, so that he reaches the right decision and thereby leads the organisation forward. If I were to summarise, we are an accounting, auditing and tax firm that also develops financial and administrative operations.
- Editor: You are Namasoft’s partner in Egypt. We would like to know about the largest clients your firm has worked with.
Mr. Ashraf: We have clients in Egypt and in the UAE, as we are Namasoft’s partner in the UAE and in Jordan. We work across a set of sectors: pharmaceutical companies, where we are particularly strong, then hospitals, then contracting companies, and after that service and trading companies. Our strength is always in the medical and contracting sectors, because these two sectors require a high degree of specialisation, unlike the trading sector, in which other audit and accounting firms can work easily and excel. The pharmaceutical sector is surrounded by a huge body of restrictions, documentation, oversight, quality control and so on, and so are hospitals, followed by contracting, since contracting is also a complex activity with enormous detail, and the ability to control it requires very deep expertise. So our clients are spread across more than one country. As for why we are Namasoft’s partner, you might first ask me why we chose Namasoft to partner with. The answer is that, frankly, we have been working with Nama for some time and have done well by it. In the end the client, who is the final product as far as we are concerned, is very happy with the software’s performance and finds that everything we promised has been delivered literally, with nothing turning out contrary to what we promised, and that is a fundamental point.
- Editor: How did you first hear about Nama ERP?
Mr. Ashraf: Through Mr. Yasser Gad. I have known Mr. Yasser Gad for roughly twenty years, and he is one of the longest-standing figures in Egypt’s software sector. When I speak about the software sector I choose my words carefully, because software must reflect the culture of the country and the culture of the society. Those who go through the experience of importing a business management system from a culture outside the country they live in find that system a great burden. It is a burden because of the differences in financial culture, the differences in management culture, the differences in language, the differences in public holidays, and the differences in the tax laws that govern each country. So the philosophy that Mr. Yasser Gad has lived through Egyptian business culture and reflected it in a business management system is a very significant one. Mr. Yasser Gad has accumulated close to 25 years of experience in the software sector, so when someone with his experience presents a business management system and says it suits the Egyptian environment, you can be sure it suits the Egyptian environment, because the depth of experience he has built up entitles him to make such a statement. So my knowledge of Nama ERP came through Mr. Yasser Gad.
Given your management position, the nature of your firm’s work and your long experience, you have certainly dealt with many systems. What advantages did you find in Nama ERP that were not present in the other systems you have worked with?
Mr. Ashraf: Allow me, before answering that question, to answer another well-known one, namely what makes us, as specialists in accounting and tax, work as a partner for a software company? It is because the nature of our work means that, before we accept an audit engagement from a client, we must first verify that the financial control systems in place are sufficiently efficient and adequate for us to rely on them in issuing audit reports. In many cases, when we deal with companies, we find that the internal control systems cannot be relied upon, which leaves us with one of two paths: either I accept the audit engagement under flimsy internal controls, which usually costs me dearly, or I decline the audit and ask them to improve their internal control systems before the audit is carried out.
We are then asked directly how they should improve their internal control systems, and our answer is: through a business management system. They then ask us to recommend one. We recommend a number of business management systems, but I will not hide from you that in the end we recommend the system we have tested over years. So that is my answer to the question (why are you a Namasoft partner when you are accountants?): because the nature of our work requires a business management system as one of the tools of internal control. We cannot do without it, and when I am at a client’s premises they usually ask me about a business management system that suits them.
As for the second question, have we dealt with other systems that Nama ERP surpasses? Of course, yes. Nama ERP is better in many respects, and this comes from years of experience. What I am going to tell you about is born of the pain auditors feel, because as a user of the system I am first and foremost an auditor, and there are fundamental points that matter to me which business owners themselves may not see. Chief among them, for example:
The first advantage is that Nama ERP is web-based rather than desktop-based, and that gives me the advantage of opening a great many branches with almost no procedures. It gives me the advantage of logging in with my user from any device, from any mobile, at any time, and this is fundamental and highly consequential, because a decision maker sometimes needs to make a decision outside working hours and away from the workplace. So the web-based advantage is very fundamental. Even at this moment as we speak, I am still astonished that some clients are still looking for desktop systems on the pretext that the internet sometimes goes down. That argument should be dead by now; the internet is now like water and air in our lives. There is no longer such a thing as “there is no internet”; there are solutions you can fall back on when the internet is cut off.
Editor: They also talk about the security of desktop systems.
Mr. Ashraf: I hear this a lot, and my answer is simple: this is an IT problem, and there are certainly protection systems that are widely used and internationally recognised. If the IT engineers are not capable of protecting the data, the problem is an IT problem and has nothing to do with the operating methodology. The web-based approach must be adopted and the obstacles to it removed, not the other way round. So the first advantage I consider truly fundamental in Nama ERP is that it is web-based.
Immediately after this comes another advantage that accountants and auditors appreciate, which is that Nama ERP has no posting procedure. The word “posting” is originally an accounting term; in accounting it means transferring from one ledger to another according to a specific scientific method. But in truth the word “posting” is misused in some business management systems. What does misused mean? It means that some software companies talk about needing a period of time to post the data or the information, and this muddies the waters, because they are talking about something that belonged to the era of paper ledgers, using it as a cover for the time their software needs to process its data. The weaker the system, the longer the period it takes to process the data, and so those responsible for such software provide a cover for that period under the pretext of posting. There is no such thing as a posting procedure with Nama ERP; the ledgers are affected directly upon saving. When I say this, I am asked whether that means anyone can do anything that affects the database. We must distinguish between what is called posting, a term tied to ledgers and documents, and the meaning of the word review. Namasoft provides five levels of review (preparer, reviewer, first reviewer, second reviewer and approver), in addition to the approvals system and the alerts system, so there is no need for what is known as posting; that is muddying the waters. Some ask what difference the time a system takes to post really makes. It makes a great deal of difference. We are now in the age of speed; the world uses instant messaging systems (WhatsApp, Messenger, and so on) and information is instantaneous. As an auditor, when I visit a client’s finance department I ask a colleague whether I can see the previous month’s trial balance (let alone the previous day’s!), and the answer is that posting has not been done yet. When I ask them to post, the day ends and the posting has still not been completed. So I leave the client and return the next day only to be told that there were some errors in the posting run and that they will fix them. And I wonder, is anyone still doing this? Sadly many still do, and it is a sad thing. I consider it a crime. So I count the absence of a posting procedure as Nama ERP’s second advantage.
Editor: Also, Mr. Ashraf, if we have to modify one of the posted documents for any reason, we have to unpost, which consumes a great deal of time.
Mr. Ashraf: Of course anyone who has been through the posting experience laughs at this. If we need to modify a document from a previous year, for example, we first need to unpost, because we have to unpost that document and every document that follows it. For example, if I had to unpost nine months of documents (not even a year), and if we assume the month has, say, 10,000 documents, that means we would need to unpost around 90,000 documents, that is, to reverse them along with everything linked to them by way of costing, pricing, store issue notes and production orders. This procedure completely exhausts the system and takes a great deal of time (possibly days), after which we make the change to the document we wanted to modify (never mind that there are systems that do not allow modification at all and force you to create a new document). After the modification we have to post everything again. That, of course, is a disaster. So when someone tells me they have bought a system that involves posting, I tell them they have committed a crime against themselves, and this comes from our experience in auditing. I ask a client for a trial balance, and in such systems the trial balance is produced only by posting. If we then discover that a colleague has made a mistake and we inform management, we have to unpost, fix the error and post again. What is this? It is a crime that has no place in our era. The volume of detail weighing on a finance department today is far greater than to imagine we have three days to devote to posting, unposting and reposting merely to modify a document. What is this? It will not do. Some try to deceive us by saying that they post automatically, meaning that every document is posted immediately, and when it is modified it must be posted again. It would be better to have some mechanism for review, and if the user has the authority, he can reverse the review and thereby unlock the document for modification. But to have the database behave like an apartment block, where the first invoice is the first floor, the second is the second floor and so on, so that if I discover an error in the first invoice, which represents the first floor, and want to correct it, I have to demolish the whole block and rebuild it from scratch! Can you imagine what that means in a company that records a million transactions a year, or half a million? Imagine wanting to unpost three years’ worth (which is the minimum tax statute period) because you need to fix something before an inspection: the answer is “unpost”.
Speaking of unposting, add to that the matter of the year-end close. In some systems the annual procedure is a complex one. As an auditor with some clients I find the sales account running into the billions, and I ask whether they really sold that much, only to be told that they have not closed the year for five years. So I ask how the system can have been open for modification for five years, and the answer is that closing is a difficult procedure, and when they want to carry it out they need the software company because of problems in the database, so they prefer to avoid the year-end close altogether. With Nama ERP, by contrast, the matter is far easier. Why endure all that trouble? Unfortunately most people working in the sector do not appreciate the seriousness of the terminology, and are not aware that the year-end close is being done through complex procedures. In Nama ERP the year-end close is a button you press, so why all this complexity in other systems, and, sadly, with a possibly incorrect result at the end of it?
I have now talked to you about a set of advantages from an auditor’s perspective: first, that it is web-based; second, the absence of posting; and third, the ease of the year-end close.
Editor: I would like to note a point, Mr. Ashraf, regarding posting. Building a system that affects cost directly upon saving, particularly when that results from modifying an old invoice, requires exceptional developers, because it is a procedure that affects costs and is extremely complex.
Mr. Ashraf: What you say is entirely correct and goes to the heart of it. I have often run into difficulties and have seen tragedies caused by this, namely the system’s inability to recalculate cost when an error occurs.
- Editor: Has Nama ERP improved the way your clients work, and to what extent? Please explain.
Mr. Ashraf: This is of course a fundamental question, and allow me to take some time in answering it. To illustrate, imagine you have a car and you have hired a driver for it. Then the driver comes and asks your permission to buy a better engine oil than the one currently used. You will tell him to do as he sees fit, because you see this as a purely technical matter; you do not expect that when you get into your car you will find it has become faster or roomier. As far as you are concerned it is no more than an oil change. Unfortunately this example is exactly how a businessman sees the decision to buy a business management system: he imagines it merely makes the finance department’s work easier. That is of course a grave mistake, because the truth is that a business management system affects the organisation’s entire performance, from the security guard to the chairman of the board. The whole company is affected by the business management system. The old way of thinking, which was only about an accounting system, is gone. Accounts are one cog in a very large machine; if that cog were made of gold while the rest of the machine’s cogs had seized with rust, the machine would not turn, even though one of the cogs is gold. For the machine to turn, all the cogs must be highly efficient. That is what a business management system does. So at the beginning of my presentation of Nama’s business management system to a client, the client may imagine that the purpose is to make the finance department better, because we are auditors. But what happens afterwards is that after roughly four months we find the businessman’s view has changed completely. Having believed the system was about making the finance department’s work easier, he now sees that the system can be a reason for growing the business. You might ask me, after how long does a businessman begin to feel this? The answer is: from the moment he starts viewing his daily, weekly and monthly reports on his mobile phone. You cannot imagine how much these reports change the decision maker’s outlook. Suppose the decision maker is at a contracting company and is always concerned with seeing subcontractor balances every week. Previously, before working with Nama ERP, to do this he would call the finance department and the engineering department, the accounts would conflict, and so on, which meant the subcontractor balances were three weeks late in reaching him. With Nama ERP he is surprised to find the subcontractor report sent to his mobile weekly at a set time, with no room for error. From that moment the businessman’s view of a business management system changes, because it helps him manage better, and this is what we read in the books (what can be measured can be improved). I am amazed when I am with a businessman who talks to me about growth, and I ask him about last month’s profit or loss. He asks the finance department, and they reply that they have not finished the reconciliation yet. I then ask about the profit for the same month in the previous year, he asks them, and the answer is that they have not yet finished closing the previous year’s accounts. So I ask about the year before that, and they tell him it is still with one of the auditors. What growth are you talking about? You do not even know whether you have made a profit or a loss in order to grow. Hence, what cannot be measured cannot be improved. But with a business management system that tells you immediately about last month’s profit or loss, this approach can be the reason an organisation moves from one place to another.
Note that Nama ERP tells you about profit or loss not after it is too late, but potentially in the moment. Reports come out of the system at a set time each month with no human intervention. As a businessman I want to see the income statement on the 2nd of every month, and the reports are sent at exactly that time.
Some accountants may say we must close within a defined period, and this does not suit our era. Payroll is issued instantly, banks post entries in real time over the internet; the culture of waiting months for information is gone. These practices must become extinct.
Returning to the question: can changing the way a business is managed through a strong system be the reason companies end up somewhere else entirely? Of course. I have clients who used to work in the old traditional way and who are now, thanks be to God, filing their papers on the Egyptian Exchange and the London Stock Exchange, thanks to the ability to measure and the immediacy of recording.
There is a point I may have overlooked when talking about Nama ERP’s advantages, which is the ability to define a very large number of companies. This point is fundamental. The idea of a businessman having several companies linked to the same chart of accounts is a well-known and widespread one that cannot be overlooked. So when I find software that forces me to give each company its own separate database and separate chart of accounts, that leads to defining the same customer more than once and the same user more than once, and this exhausts us as auditors. I am supposed to be auditing the business, and then I find myself having to ask the client whether this customer is the same as that other customer. So one of the critical advantages Nama ERP supports is the ability to include a very large number of companies on the same chart of accounts, which gives you the ability to produce a consolidated report for all the companies. Add to that the ability to open a very large number of branches in each company, on the same chart of accounts. Software that offers these features costs millions, whereas Nama ERP gives them to you in local currency, with Egyptian business culture and with technical support. I am always astonished at businessmen who are drawn to international software on which they spend a great deal and still do not get what Nama ERP offers.
- Editor: And the designers of international software are also somewhat removed from the Egyptian or Arab environment.
Mr. Ashraf: Exactly, and that is why I said at the start of the interview that Mr. Yasser Gad is the source of the expertise in Nama ERP. In the world of business it is said that some things are bought not for themselves but for their seller. The question of who created the culture and who created the expertise is a fundamental one. Do not plant British culture in Egyptian soil; that can lead to many problems.
Another fundamental advantage results from opening several companies on the same chart of accounts. If you follow world events in the specialist business press, you come across the term “financial foxes”, the experts in financial statements, how they are drawn up and how they are restated. They say something that deserves respect: that inter-company accounts between sister companies are the black hole into which companies fall. So opening a group of companies on the same database is not a luxury. Failing to do so can be the reason an organisation collapses. Why?
Because these financial foxes have seen from their experience that the biggest problem in the accounts of sister companies is that when goods or money are transferred, those goods and that money always fall into the black hole. The first company records that it transferred, say, a million pounds to the other company, while those responsible at the other company do not record it, out of forgetfulness or neglect or for any other reason. The result over time is that you find the sister-company account at one company inflated with amounts, while at the other company the amounts bear no relation to the first company’s figures. At the end of a year or two or three we come face to face with this catastrophe, but only after it is too late and the losses run into millions and billions. That is why you find in the books: beware of sister-company accounts, they are the black hole into which companies fall.
So when I tell you that Nama ERP gives you the ability to open more than one company on the same database and on the same chart of accounts, do not take what I say lightly; this is an auditor speaking.
I meet some owners of business management systems and discuss this matter with them, and their solution is to treat the company as a cost centre.
What does a company have to do with a cost centre, and why do we call things by other than their names? A company may have independent partners and may have its own independent profit distribution. Why muddy the waters? It is a sad thing. As auditors we see things that sadden us, because the consequence is that the organisation collapses after a short while for the reasons I am describing.
Another advantage in Nama ERP is the speed of going live. Some software companies take a period stretching to a year. That period might be acceptable if the client were already running on a successful business management system, but what I actually see with clients is that it is rare for me to walk into a company that wants to change the business management system it is running on unless that system has caused it numerous problems. So how can it be asked to wait a year before the new system is up and running? Namasoft, on the other hand, has the advantage of speed of activation. I told you in this interview that we take four months, but that is the maximum; in implementation we do not reach four months, and this is a very fundamental point, because four months in the life of a business is a long period, especially if the client keeps bleeding while the development company busies itself with “studies, research and analyses”. But why does implementation with Namasoft not take long? Because the system’s infrastructure is strong, so activation does not necessarily require additional coding from the development department, and this is a point I wish everyone listening would understand. I have often seen business management systems where, if we want to add a field to the invoice details for a barcode, for example, the implementer disappears for a month simply to add a column to the invoice, because the system he works on has no such infrastructure, and so, to add the required improvement, the software company needs to recode. Namasoft is different: thanks to the infrastructure, the implementer can add fields without needing to go back to the development department and recode. I am talking here about a company that has an unsatisfactory business management system; imagine a company that has no system at all and needs one to keep up with it, because its business has grown and it needs a system that follows it at the same pace, only to then wait a year or eight months for the system to go live. Honestly, I hear laughable figures. Those figures could be accepted if the cost were lower in return, or if the company were running successfully with no bleeding of its assets. In that case we could wait those eight months or that year, but that has not been my experience. I always walk into companies and find they need a rapid remedy. It does not stand up in the world of business for a client to wait a year for the system to go live. What will you do during that year? Over-philosophising things strips them of their essence, so why all this?
- Editor: As a Namasoft partner, does training on the system, whether for your own implementers or for the users at your clients, happen as quickly as required?
Mr. Ashraf: Absolutely. When I meet a businessman and he asks me how difficult the system is to work with, my answer is that anyone who can use a touchscreen phone (mobile touch) is qualified enough for me as a Nama ERP user. As for my own implementers, they grasp what they need in a very short time, because Nama ERP was built on a smooth and scientific way of thinking with no room for randomness. Consequently, working out where to start is very easy; my implementers do not spend long absorbing the system, particularly when we tie it to the accounting profession, since they can be trained by Nama on the software techniques and trained at our office on the techniques related to accounting. When I said “the accounting profession” I meant the word precisely, because I always run into a problem: wherever I go I find accounting being done according to personal opinions. For example, I sometimes go to companies and find they are still working in Excel, and when they want to record an entry against a person (who might be a customer, a supplier, an employee, a partner, and so on), I find they use colours to distinguish that person’s type, so that green means “customer” and red means “supplier”, and so on. It is quite absurd. Imagine that I still find this method in huge companies. That is of course a grave mistake. That is why I always say we must return to the accounting profession: before the implementer is skilled in software, he must be skilled as an accountant and an auditor. So one of our strengths is that our implementer must be an accountant and an auditor before he is a software specialist, and therefore he knows where he is going. This is a fundamental point that we repeat constantly, because if you do not know where you are going, you do not know what means of transport to take.
To clarify: when you find an international company publishing its financial statements in a newspaper, why does it do that? The answer is because that is the end of the road. I left my house today for the sake of those financial statements. The financial statements are the end of the road, so the accountant must know where the system will take him.
- Editor: Mr. Ashraf, when you hire a new implementer, is it easy for him to get to grips with the system’s capabilities, or does it take a long time?
Mr. Ashraf: After about a month or a month and a half, he has most of the fundamentals that allow him to work well in this field under the supervision of managers.
- Editor: That is for the implementer, so it must be even easier for the user, given the nature of their work.
Mr. Ashraf: As I said before, it is enough for me that the user knows how to use a touchscreen phone (mobile touch).
- Editor: And is this available in other software?
Mr. Ashraf: Usually not, because much other software follows a screens methodology rather than a documents methodology, and this is one of the fundamental points in favour of Nama ERP. Nama ties every transaction to a document, which matches our nature as auditors, whereas some other software is always preoccupied with screens (open a screen and type into it so the system opens another screen). Nama ERP, by contrast, was built on a scientific way of thinking, namely that every transaction is a document, and that document can in the end be printed in line with what actually exists in the real world. When you deal with a very basic user (a cashier, for example), what he produces in the end is a document, not a screen. So Nama ERP opens the very same document for you, except that instead of writing with a pen you write with a keyboard. There is nothing for me to teach you, and this helps our implementers adapt to the work very quickly.
…to carry out a particular procedure; but Nama ERP follows the documents methodology.
I would like to tell you that we had an experience with Nama in which we set up a database for one client with around 4,000 users and around 250 branches, all via a WhatsApp group, and the organisation with its branches and staff was up and running in no more than twenty days. Can you imagine the system being implemented over WhatsApp?
So if you are asking me about ease of use, no, of course, the system is very easy, and on top of that Nama produces videos of certain procedures on YouTube that the user can consult when needed.
- Editor: Do you have any negative comments about the cost of Nama ERP, whether the price of the software or the value of the annual maintenance contract?
Not at all. What international software offers, Nama ERP offers to a large extent, with the difference that international software may charge large sums in dollars on top of pounds. The cost of Nama ERP against the added value it delivers is nothing. I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about a personal experience I had some time ago when I was young. I met one of the people who were implementing an international business management system for an international company, and when I heard the price of the system I was astonished; it was a huge figure. I asked him whether it was reasonable for a client to buy software at that price, and the answer was yes, because the scale of the leakage in assets was far greater than the price of the software. I realised then that there is a yardstick for judging. When do I say software is expensive? When the scale of the leakage in assets is less than the price of the software. But what actually happens is that the price of a system today may be far less than the scale of the leakage.
Perhaps a decision maker listening to me now will respond that his stores are sound. The issue is not only stores, not only cash, not only cheques, not only machines or machine maintenance, but also employees’ and workers’ time, their leave and their assignments. There are points that represent gaps in the accounting, financial and administrative system that may cause millions to leak away, with the businessman paying them out in cash within the payroll without realising it. So to judge whether a system is expensive, it must be compared with the scale of the leakage. If the monthly leakage is, say, 10,000 pounds, then software costing 2,000 or 3,000 pounds is enough for me; but if the monthly leakage is a million pounds, then acquiring a system for a million pounds would be a great thing.
So when you talk to me about the price of Nama ERP, it bears no comparison at all with the scale of the added value it creates inside organisations, and this is something no one grasps except us as auditors, when we observe the change in the financial statements before and after using the system. That change is due to the business management system in use, which is what we read about in the books as “the internal control system”. That phrase is well known, but who actually puts it into effect? Who has the capability to activate internal control systems that protect the organisation’s assets from leakage? That is the chemistry of it. That is why this is hard to hear from anyone other than us as auditors.
- Editor: As a Namasoft partner, when any problem occurs you usually go directly to the development department. How satisfied are you with the level of support the development department gives you?
Mr. Ashraf: Tremendous. And to be fair, I normally only need Namasoft’s technical support on new projects. Once implementation at the client is complete, almost all their requirements have been met, so I rarely need to go back to Namasoft after that, and I consider that a great advantage.
By way of analogy, you know how you buy a machine or a piece of equipment that does not constantly need servicing; Nama ERP is like that. Once the first few months in the life of the project are over (I call it the incubation period, the period in which the company gets to know the system and the system gets to know the company), we hardly ever need to go back to Nama, and when support is needed our own implementers generally handle the task.
But when do we turn to Namasoft? For development, when creating something new such as a new module. As for routine daily operational work, our own staff handle it, and in fairness, when we do need Namasoft we find them a real help; that must be acknowledged.
- Editor: Have you faced any problems such as delayed responses or delays in resolving an issue?
Mr. Ashraf: Not at all. Namasoft has designed a tremendous system known as tickets (technical support requests). Through this system you can log into the CRM to raise the development request (or support request) you want, and as soon as the company reviews it, a notification is sent that it has been reviewed. A Nama employee may call the client by phone for clarification and then carry out the request, and the important thing is that all of this is documented, which is a very fundamental point, because I have worked with many other software products where these procedures are not documented, which leads to disputes and problems between the client and the software company.
- Editor: Are there any technical shortcomings you see in Nama ERP?
Mr. Ashraf: I have run into only one lone shortcoming, and I have had promises from Namasoft’s management to fix it, which is the case of having more than one company with different main currencies. This point is painful, because on the same database there is more than one main currency. I hope they find a remedy for this problem, because, as I mentioned, we have companies in the UAE and in Jordan, so multiple currencies are common and familiar for us. On this note, I would like to tell you that I was at the last GITEX exhibition and attended a session for one of the international software products (GITEX 2019), and I found they suffer from the same problem. But I want to tell you that I am optimistic that Namasoft will overcome this problem soon, because the idea of having more than one company on the same database with more than one main currency has become widespread.
Management contacted Mr. Ashraf Hagar, and it turned out that this limitation exists in documents related to the project management module, and the solution was explained to them. Sister companies operating in different currencies work normally in the rest of the Nama systems.
- Editor: Have you ever complained about one of the staff, and what do you think of the way management handled that complaint?
Mr. Ashraf: Not at all, I have never experienced that. Your staff are respectable and Mr. Yasser Gad selects them with great care, and I can vouch for that. I have no reservations on this point.
- Editor: Are there any substantial improvements you would like Namasoft to add to the system?
Mr. Ashraf: Your new GUI, when it goes live, will be impressive, because I have worked with some international software and found features such as displaying something like Excel inside the software. I can imagine that becoming available with the new GUI, which will make a big difference when working with the system by phone. I personally work with the system, deal with colleagues and review the daily, weekly and monthly reports on my phone, and the ability to sort, filter and rearrange columns in document details as you would in Excel is a serious matter. If it is done for Nama ERP to the fullest extent, it will be wonderful.
- Editor: Do you follow Namasoft’s YouTube channel, and do you have any comments on it?
Mr. Ashraf: Tremendous, and it sometimes helps us with training.
- Editor: What do you think of Namasoft’s website, and do you have any comments on it?
Mr. Ashraf: I have no comments on it; I have not had time to look at it closely. I did look at it some time ago, and my impression was that it is tremendous. I found the list of clients and the company’s founders on it, and that is what matters to me.
- Editor: Naturally a partner may need staff experienced in implementation. Has Namasoft helped you with that?
Mr. Ashraf: Of course, and this helps me a great deal in choosing suitable implementers, since Namasoft tests them on the technical side and I test them on the accounting side.
- Editor: As a Namasoft partner, what impression have the clients you have worked with formed of the system?
Mr. Ashraf: Their impression is that they are amazed after a very short time, because the client compares the added value achieved with the system against the scale of the financial sacrifice he made, and finds the gap between the two is enormous, which is a source of amazement. You might ask me why I link the price of the system to the added value. Because you may have added a million pounds of value for the client, but if you have already taken a million pounds from him for the system, the client has gained nothing. When the price of the system is no more than 10% of the added value, you have given the client something truly fundamental.
- Editor: Mr. Ashraf, in light of Nama ERP’s technical level and the way the company deals with its clients, how do you see Namasoft’s future, God willing?
Mr. Ashraf: As I told you earlier, I was at the GITEX exhibition, and I found that what we offer in Egypt through Nama ERP is in no way inferior to what they offer. I would like to tell you that one of those international products was showcasing its ability to send reports over WhatsApp. Nama ERP already provides that feature. What I see is that we have come close to matching the major business management system companies, at a cost that bears no relation to the cost they talk about. So I expect that within a year or two at most, God willing, Nama ERP will be number 1 in the Middle East, and not only in Egypt. That is not because we run tremendous advertising, but because the substance of what we do is serious: we support strong internal control systems, we meet the requirements of auditors, and we meet operational requirements, which is a fundamental point. As I said before, Nama ERP does not cover only the financial dimension, but the financial, administrative and operational dimensions. Supposing Nama were deployed at a factory, Nama ERP addresses quality control, inspection, production planning and purchasing planning. This is extremely serious material.
So Nama ERP covers all the operational, financial and administrative dimensions, and that is fundamental. You might ask me: we have discussed the operational and financial dimensions, but what about the administrative one?
The administrative dimension, because Nama provides a policies system so that all the organisation’s policies are written down (and this is a fundamental point) and must be followed by the organisation. Any update made to a policy can be notified to every member of the organisation authorised to receive it, so administrative policies are no longer personal judgements and opinions tied to a manager who may leave the organisation, only for the next manager to come and change those policies. Instead, the policies are written down and placed on the system. Take travel allowances, for example: the travel policy may be tied to the organisational structure according to the employee’s grade, but suppose something unexpected happens in the country and we are forced to change the travel policy. You can simply write the new policy in the database, and then every qualified member of the company is notified. The policy is no longer confined to one person; it is a policy laid down to be applied, so the next manager arrives to find the policy written down and available to all employees. This is extremely fundamental and keeps you away from a great many problems. That is why I told you that Nama ERP covers operational, financial and administrative aspects.
- Editor: Do you agree to this interview being published on Namasoft’s website and on YouTube?
Of course, certainly.
- Editor: Mr. Ashraf, thank you.