Kenyan-based food and consumer goods manufacturer and distributor Bidco Africa, Ltd.,  plans to become the number one supplier of consumer goods including cooking oils, baking products, detergents, personal care and beauty products and animal feeds, across Africa by 2030. To do that, says Bidco CEO Vimal Shah, it needs to grow 400 percent over the next five years and expand from the 15 national markets it serves now (see map at right) to cover the entire continent. It also needs to expand its manufacturing, now centered in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, to other parts of Africa to bring production closer to new markets throughout the continent.

This ambitious plan will require both capital and the undivided attention of senior management. IT is critical to supporting this rapid expansion, but at the same time it is both a potential distraction and drain on capital that the company needs to support its expansion. Cloud might be an answer, and Bidco does use Microsoft’s cloud services for email and some other applications. But the company is not ready yet to trust the cloud for critical core applications that must be available 24/7.

“Scaling up is important for us,” Shah said. “Rather than say, ‘Let’s go and invest in this or invest in that,’ we say, ‘Let’s have a scale-up situation where we can scale up sales, we can scale up our operations and don’t worry about the technology.’”

To achieve that, Bidco turned to IBM services to bring infrastructure-as-a-service into its data center. To support the rapid expansion Bidco plans at a fixed monthly cost, IBM will transform Bidco’s current infrastructure with four Power Systems, a V7000 Storage system, a Power Systems Hardware Management Console, two IBM System Storage SAN Switches and two IBM Storage tape drives. The systems will be located in Bidco’s data center but owned and operated by IBM, giving Bidco the core systems it needs without draining business capital it needs to invest in its expansion.

Reassigning staff to a strategic role

The arrangement also frees Bidco’s IT staff from keeping the lights on to focus on strategic development to support the business, one of Bidco’s specific goals in negotiating the contract with IBM. IT staff “will not be let go,” Shah (left) said. “They will now be deployed to work with supply chain issues, solving customers’ problems and designing visual intelligence, so we can see what to do to enhance our margins, our EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] and our brands.”

They also will be focused on mobile business, which “here in Africa has become a big thing.” Shah hopes to increase ROI by about 20 percent and staff productivity by 40 percent, in large part through investment in mobile.

As for the cloud, Bidco is waiting for improvements in the infrastructure in its present and target markets. “We have a six-year agreement [with IBM] right now, but I am sure we will move to a hybrid cloud system as the public infrastructure becomes more robust,” he said.

Map and photo courtesy Bidco Africa, Ltd.