Digitizing The Whole Procurement Process – KETRACO

Public sector procurement is considered a cornerstone of strategic governance and a crucial pillar of service delivery.

When one of Kenya’s leading state corporations, Kenya Electricity Transmission Company Limited, needed to enhance its procurement capabilities to meet its regulatory commitments, it adopted SAP to leverage the power and scale of the largest procurement network in the world.

“Our vision is to be the leading interconnector in Africa, and to achieve that we needed access to world-class procurement capabilities that would unlock greater automation, control, consistency, and scale,” says David Kariuki, ICT Manager at KETRACO.

“We chose SAP Business Network to automate and enhance our procurement processes and ensure our vital work continues even during the most disruptive times of the pandemic.”

KETRACO is a fully government-owned state corporation with a mandate to plan, design, construct, operate, and maintain Kenya’s national transmission grid. Since it was incorporated in 2008, the company has made efforts to strengthen and extend the national power transmission grid to enhance the quality, reliability, and security of electricity supply in Kenya.

The company’s SAP journey began in 2016 after it implemented SAP ECC with best-practice modules. The implementation won KETRACO gold at the SAP Quality Awards for both Africa and the greater EMEA region.

Waldorf visit sparks SAP Business Network interest

“Part of the award involved a team from our company visiting the SAP headquarters in Waldorf,” says Kariuki. “Here we were introduced to SAP Business Network for the first time and saw the exciting product innovation roadmap. We knew that this is where our technology roadmap would lead.”

In 2018, a Presidential Directive was issued, compelling all state-owned corporations to migrate their procurement platforms to an e-procurement solution with integration into an IFMS portal. This was one of the catalysts for KETRACO’s adoption of the SAP Business Network, which Kariuki and his team implemented in two phases.

The first phase involved the deployment of SAP Business Network Commerce Automation, a cloud service that enables the electronic exchange of procurement documents between buyers and suppliers through the SAP Business Network, the largest procurement network in the world.

In the second phase of the project, the team implemented the SAP Business Network Sourcing Suite.

“We identified three modules that would add the most value to our organization, namely Supplier Lifecycle, Contract Management, and the main Sourcing module,” explains Kariuki.