The Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) is in technical negotiations with Oracle, an American company, to work on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) – an automation system which will integrate the whole process of the Bank under one system, pioneering the technology in the local financial sector.
CBE, which will be the fourth in order to acquire the system next top Ethiopian Airlines, Ethio-telecom, and the Ethiopian Railway Corporation (ERC), will be implementing the system within a month.
Ethiopian Airlines and Ethio-telecom have been using the system since 2009 and the bid for ERC’s system is expected to be announced before the beginning of the Light Rail Transit (LRT) that is being constructed in Addis Abeba for 475 million dollars having started December 2012. Now the project has reached 85pc completion.
“The system will enable the Bank to effectively control the resources that the company has like the vehicles and their service, an employee’s annual leave and salary, as well as customer relationship management,” Daniel Hailu, the Bank’s project management office director told Fortune.
CBE, which is one of the three state-owned banks in the country, is the largest bank in the industry, registering an asset of 242.7 billion Br. The bank has 8.5 million account holders and 20,000 employees with more than 900 branches across the country. The capital of the bank, as of June 30, 2014 has reached 9.04 billion Br. CBE opened 124 branches in the 2013/14 fiscal year.
The project, which will cost the Bank 2.5 million dollars, found Oracle on a second bid in 2013 after cancelling a first bid because of lack of qualifying bidders.
The software will enable the Bank to control back office activities and it requires workers that can work on customization and analysis of data.
Bank of Abyssinia (BoA), one of the private banks in the country, has also been seeking competent companies to develop management strategy.
The oracle corporation is an American computer technology corporation headquartered in Redwood city, California, United States. The company specializes in developing and marketing computer hardware systems and enterprise software products – particularly its own brands of database management systems.
The company also builds tools for database development and systems of middle-tier software, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software and supply chain management (SCM) software.
The second bid was announced in 2014, while the first one, which was announced in 2013 failed because of lack of competent participants.
In the second bid two companies participated in the supply of the license for the software and eleven both local and international venders participated in the implementation. The two companies were Oracle, the one that won the bid, and SAP, a Germany software manufacturing company.
