SAP Middle East North Africa (MENA) LLC, on Tuesday announced that the Ras Al-Khaimah Free Trade Zone (RAKFTZ) has gone live with SAP Business Suite, to enable its mission to be an investment hub founded on a commitment to total investor satisfaction. With sales growth of more than 100 percent in 2006, and 150 percent in 2007, RAKFTZ requires solutions for customer relationship management (CRM) and real estate management to best facilitate the group's explosive growth. RAKFTZ supported more than 4500 companies by 2008 from more than 106 countries covering different fields of trading, industries, consultancies & services. Owned and operated by the government of Ras Al-Khaimah, RAKFTZ is now one of the largest free trade zones in the Middle East, thanks in large part to the sophisticated manner in which it is able to process investor registration files across nine different departments: marketing, sales, real estate, engineering, administration, finance, accounts, management, and legal. RAKFTZ chose to deploy SAP Business Suite applications for their comprehensive functionality and auditable, scaleable, and expandable design. “Providing the fastest and most accurate possible processing of customer information is critical to the success of our operation, as free zone investment recruitment and retention is an extremely competitive exercise,” said Jerry Williams, RAKFTZ's director of IT. “SAP's best-practice experience in real estate management and customer relationship management has brought enormous value to our internal processes, and has been significantly important to our continued excellence in realizing investor satisfaction.” In addition to implementing SAP Customer Relationship Management, the prime scope of the engagement was also to implement software to run core enterprise resource, planning processes, including financials, controlling, human resources and materials and real state management. “We fully anticipate continued growth in the number of clients RAKFTZ will service over the next few years, and the SAP system we put in place now will largely enhance our ability to handle their demands as customers. The implementation of SAP at RAKFTZ is integral to the continued success of our operation,” said Zainab Abbas Qambar, RAK Free Trade Zone's Information System manager. The scalability and highly secured SAP system now in place supports seamless integration across RAKFTZ's marketing offices located in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Turkey, Germany, ,US & India. SAP solutions will vastly increase RAKFTZ's efficiency and customer services helping to providing accurate and on time reporting to enable management to make fully informed decisions. “RAK free trade zone's ongoing success story is an excellent example of SAP's ability to apply world-class, industry-proven technology to the Middle East region's most pressing business challenges,” said Ayman Abouseif, vice president of Sales, SAP MENA. “RAKFTZ has gone from a small, manual process to a global, entirely automated process.” __
