The Digital Economy and Technology General Division (DETGD) at the General Federation of Egyptian Chambers of Commerce (FEDCOC) has launched a digital transformation initiative for small- and medium-sized business enterprises (SMEs). The initiative, launched in cooperation with Microsoft Egypt, was announced by Ibrahim Al-Arabi, President of the FEDCOC and President of the Cairo Chamber of Commerce. The joint initiative aims to provide companies with enterprise resource planning systems (ERP) to unify, simplify and integrate business procedures at companies. These include financial management, purchasing department activities, sales and distribution management, and warehousing. It also comes as part of several DETGD initiatives aimed at helping companies, whatever their stage of digital transformation, especially SMEs, overcome the current global crisis. Al-Arabi stressed that the ERP system includes applications that facilitate data and information sharing between a company's various departments, such as manufacturing, purchases, or sales. He added that the initiative to help SMEs undergo digital transformation seeks to provide all the advantages of an ERP system, including interdepartmental integration and different systems of enterprise management. There would also be vast data storage capacity capabilities, and the possibility of updating them continuously, while adding new files. Karim Ghonaim, Head of DETGD and member of the Cairo Chamber of Commerce's Board of Directors, said that businesses are aware of the importance of ERP systems in improving work systems. There are also many benefits in terms of increasing performance efficiency, improving the production process and increasing revenues. The main obstacle facing most institutions is the high cost of obtaining these technologies and training employees to use them. These come in addition to installation and operation costs for these applications. The joint DETGD and Microsoft initiative has made these systems available to all business organisations starting from EGP 999. Ghonaim said that ERP applications are a category of business management programme, which are usually a set of integrated applications, that the organisation can use to collect, store, manage, and interpret commercial data. The application provides an integrated and continuous view of the basic business systems by using rules of Common Databases, managed by the Database Management System. It also allows monitoring of Business Resources such as cash, raw materials, and production capacity, alongside Business Commitments such as customer orders and payroll.
