InTrade Africa, formally known as Brandworx, is a tech business based in South Africa that connects developing markets in Africa with mobile technology that enables informal sales, distribution, and payments. The organization assists African businesses to rapidly grow and transform through strategic advisory, managed services, projects, and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. InTrade Africa has conducted business in more than 23 African Countries for over 16 Years. The organization maintains a deep focus on local market implementations and hands-on support through various means.
inTrade Africa was performing new integrations between their inTrade Africa platform and other systems to improve the platform’s performance and meet each customer’s unique business integration requirements. The organization was faced with the decision to continue building the integrations independently or investing in a platform that would help speed up the integration process. As efficient as inTrade Africa is at putting systems together on demand, the organization needed the ability to be agile and integrate on demand without spending a copious number of hours building point-to-point integrations. Finding the right integration platform that not only solved inTrade Africa’s data integration challenges but was also within their budget, was an extremely challenging task. Edward Bothma, Chief Technology Officer at inTrade Africa said, “I think the most important insight is that we chose to invest in an integration platform rather than build our own integrations, and that's a very important decision that I.T (Information Technology) leaders have to consider when looking to cut costs and improve operational efficiency.”
inTrade Africa has partnered with Synatic to solve their complex and resource-intensive integration challenges with accuracy and unrivaled speed. Synatic offered a Nimble, Simple, and Powerful automation solution that came complete with a multitude of tools, bringing the flexibility and configurability that inTrade Africa needed. This, in turn, allowed inTrade Africa to select exactly what they needed to integrate with their inTrade Africa Platform instead of being restricted by pre-configured connectors and reams of intricate code.
Bothma said “Synatic helps us with a lot of integration to multiple back-end systems. What’s more, the platform assists us in carrying out a lot of analytics on the data we collect, and then operationalizes this data for both automation and communication processes, based on analytic results”
Because inTrade Africa was building integrations on demand, which is the nature of the inTrade Africa platform, the organization continuously adds more integrations as part of its customers’ requirements. inTrade Africa made Synatic part of their business offering because of the platform’s ability to iteratively integrate and automate data according to their client’s needs. “That was extremely valuable to us and gave us a significant competitive advantage,” said Bothma.
Distell Group, a multinational brewing and beverage company, based in South Africa approached inTrade Africa to assist them in building an export management commerce platform for their customers to use, called Distributor Marketplace (DMP). The portal was built to simplify and streamline the way distributors across Africa ordered stock from Distell. The construction of the portal was made possible by the capabilities offered by the Synatic HIP (Hybrid Integration Platform). By using Synatic’s HIP, inTrade Africa was able to take SAP language, which is challenging for non-technical users to understand and converted it to customer language commonly used when shipping goods, thereby turning the DMP into a customer-centric portal. For example, the portal would allow a distributor to order ten trucks of Savannah and five thousand cases of Hunters Dry. Synatic would then convert this order into pallets and container space and determine the shipping and logistics costs of the order. “This process may sound simple, but when you are working with export logistics, you need precise container capacity details for shipping and logistic purposes, which is much more complicated than it seems,” said Bothma. Synatic can determine what space is available in containers and it strategically packs the container to meet the right cost requirements.
In addition to calculating shipping requirements, Synatic separates batch orders and turns them into individual set orders. This means that a single order on the portal can be separated into ten orders so that each truck or container can be transported with its own invoice. This ensures that if one container ends up getting delayed at a port, the rest of the order is not affected. Synatic then pushes this information to the commerce platform and creates a proforma invoice so that Distell customers are still able to see detailed order information and what still needs to be delivered.
Through the combination of inTrade Africa and Synatic’s HIP, inTrade Africa was able to integrate and streamline data between Distell's commerce tool and SAP in such a way that the portal took what an entire room of export controllers was doing and automated the entire order and shipping process. By automating data between multiple platforms, inTrade Africa turned a process that was taking them up to two weeks to complete, into a matter of minutes. Bothma said, “Synatic does not just behave like an API (Application Programming Interfaces). It makes decisions and performs intricate calculations. It is a tool that answers shipping questions and does so generically for other software if we needed it to. The Synatic platform does not simply function as a conduit, it acts as a calculator for very advanced shipping coordination.”
“Working with Synatic has been great because they value the integrity of old-fashioned partnerships. There are many ways to partner with technology solution providers, however, dealing with some of them can leave you feeling like just another number. However, Synatic has always remained involved in the partnership and offered us assistance whenever we needed it,” said Bothma. “You'll always be presented with hurdles and roadblocks when you’re integrating systems, and it's important that your integration provider sticks with you while you navigate the entire process.,” added Bothma
By working with Synatic, inTrade Africa was able to solve their integration needs and couple a substantial number of systems and data with incredible speed and accuracy. inTrade Africa was able to save valuable resources and take back control of its data, resulting in improved resource management and an overall reduction in costs.
“We came to a point with our own application where we realized we would need to decide on either building our own integration solution or partner with an integration platform. The decision to partner with Synatic was a highly beneficial one.” - Edward Bothma / Chief Technology Officer / inTrade Africa
