Eng. Ahmed Qasid, Development Manager and one of Namasoft’s founders, took the opportunity of Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan being in Cairo to interview him and find out how far Nama ERP has improved the way Al Khunaizan Electrical Appliances works.
Client: Al Khunaizan Electrical Appliances
Date: 18/08/2021
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan and the story behind Nama ERP’s success at Al Khunaizan
To listen to the full interview, please play the video below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9JRIQMepFA
- Eng. Qasid: We would like to take advantage of your being in Egypt to talk about how Nama ERP is running for you. Before we get to the questions about the system, could you introduce yourself, your company and what it does?
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: We are Al Khunaizan Electrical Appliances in Riyadh. We have been working with Nama ERP since 2016 — five wonderful years, praise be to God, with no trouble at all. Choosing Nama from among the systems that were on the table was, I believe, the right choice; very much the right choice, praise be to God.
- Eng. Qasid: What were the biggest problems you were suffering from that Nama ERP solved?
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: The biggest problem before was that none of the data could be linked together — accounts, sales invoicing, the warehouse, inventory and HR could not be tied together at the press of a single button. Before we used Nama, linking things up was somewhat painful. Retrieving data in Nama is also dramatically faster; the sheer volume of data does not affect how easily you can extract it or work with the system.
The service that connects the branches over the internet is excellent too — we do not run into any major problems, praise be to God.
I compared Nama ERP with other systems, and I still compare to this day, in case there is something new to be seen elsewhere. I have not seen anything in the software market worth replacing Nama ERP for. That has not happened so far.
- Eng. Qasid: God willing it never will.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: God willing. Frankly, even the requests I expect not to exist — perhaps because I phrase them in an unusual way — I find are already there. That gives me great confidence in you. I think there are things I have not yet come across that you already have, and that whatever is not there will have a good solution with you.
- Eng. Qasid: God willing. We are very pleased with your opinion of Namasoft.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: And I am pleased all round. There are many things I liked, such as delivery, communicating with customers through the CRM, and HR features like integration with the fingerprint device. Anything we needed, I do not think it took you more than a week or ten days — and that is when it was not already there in the first place.
- Eng. Qasid: Exactly. The reason is that the number of clients we have has produced a great many requests, and we do not usually turn client requests down, which means the system contains an enormous number of features that benefit a large number of clients.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: Yes, there are many things in Nama that I did not think were important, but over time I discovered they were.
Another top feature is the linked chains, from the purchase order through to the issue note, for instance. You can trace an item from the moment it enters the chain until it leaves. Few packages pay attention to this point; few take care of it.
The same goes for how pricing is set up, how approvals are set up, how customers are set up — each customer with their own price, and so on. Not every package includes these features. Other packages may have them, but not with the same ease that Nama ERP offers.
For example, discounts in some other packages force the user to enter a percentage and do not support a discount being a fixed amount as well.
Being able to have, say, 50 customers linked to 50 price lists — I have tried that in systems other than Nama and never saw it done as easily. Some people I know have one program for accounting, one for HR, one for the warehouse and one for delivery. But anyone who tries Nama ERP will, I think, get all of those things in one place.
- Eng. Qasid: We are very pleased, and we hope always to live up to your confidence in us.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: My advice to any client about to work with any accounting system is to first prepare the features and requirements they need. Asking the vendor to redo work because further requirements turn up after development is not a simple matter. For a client to end up with a sound system, they must first understand what their own company needs — not what another client needs. What is wanted has to be communicated to the vendor correctly from the outset so that the vendor can deliver the intended way of working. The vendor will not correct the client’s mistakes; it only implements what it is asked for. So if the result of the development is wrong, that is fundamentally the client’s mistake, because they did not set out the required work correctly from the beginning.
- Eng. Qasid: True — when requirements are asked for wrongly, the result is bound to be wrong.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: Honestly, to this day I have never, ever suffered — praise be to God — not even with the tax calculations I was so worried about. In the end it is no more than the press of a button to get the information required.
Praise be to God, everything is in order, follow-up is in order — review options and audit options are available. You can tell quickly whether any document has been reviewed or not. You can also tell quickly whether it has an archive or not. The ability to upload images of all your paper documents into Nama means that for any document you need, you do not have to ask anyone — just one click, and then you submit it to the tax authority, for example.
All of our documents have been scanned and uploaded to the system. Every document is there. The idea is that anything you want, you find it.
- Eng. Qasid: More important than these features is that the client puts in the effort to get the most out of the system, such as scanning and uploading documents as you described. You have to be aware of the difference that using the system’s features makes.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: The client has to get the most out of the system within the scope of what their company needs. There are some features in the system that we genuinely do not need, but when we do need a feature we ask whether it exists in the system — and I cannot recall ever asking you about something and being told it was not there.
- Eng. Qasid: Praise be to God.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: In fact I asked you about one of the features just now and found it was there.
- Eng. Qasid: Thank you very much, and we hope always to live up to your confidence in us.
Mr. Fahd Al-Khunaizan: May God bless you.