Kenya Tea Development Agency Ltd

The award recognizes the top 100 companies/organizations (private, public or otherwise) who have excelled in using ICT to create business value and to transform business through innovation and execution of ICT initiatives.  

Left: Ms Mwende Gatabaki,
Group General Manager-ICT; KTDA
Receives the award on stage in Colorado Springs; California US on Tuesday 25th August 2009.

According to Ms Maryfran Johnson; Editor in Chief; CIO magazine; the criteria for nomination for of the award lays a lot of emphasis on the following three elements:

 How it all began:
The core challenges in the management of out-growers business include the ever-escalating labor costs, energy costs and operational overheads. After privatization of KTDA, from a government parastatal to a small-scale farmers company in Year 2000, the Board of KTDA recognized that ICT could make a huge difference in operational efficiency; and therefore embarked on computerization and automation of the out grower management and the tea value chain.

The ICT initiatives deployed focused on addressing the challenges mentioned through development of an ICT infrastructure (a privately owned VSAT network connecting all the 57 KTDA managed factories; which are located in areas where public infrastructure is not available even to-date);    business process re-engineering and automation of the business processes.  The impact and success rate of the initiatives is what warranted the award.

Impact of the ICT initiatives:
•    Operational costs Reduction:  Establishing digital connectivity and automation of business processes eliminated the massive overtime cost caused by duplication of roles and responsibilities.  In addition, automated manufacturing equipment which requires no manual intervention has been a huge labor costs savings for the factories.  Use of email, intranet and workflows and automated processes have enhanced communication and drastically reduced operational costs such as communication; transport costs and stationery.

•    Information power:  The wide area network has eased access to information and service delivery. e.g. It takes 3-days for a new growers registration compared to previous 3-6 months before automation; growers no longer have to come all the way to the head office (over 300 kms for some) to resolve their problems; all the information is easily available at their factory. This has also empowered the managers at the factory as the information they need to make decisions is now easily available at the click of a button.

•    Stocks reconciliation:  ICT has made it possible to track packed made teas from the factory all the way to the warehouses in Mombasa.  At the click of a button, the Factory Manager can tell the levels of packed teas at the factory, those on transit, those warehoused in Mombasa, at which warehouse they are stored, those marked for the auction, the ones already sold and the prices they fetched at the auction on the same day that they are sold.  Previously, it could take more than two weeks before Factory Managers could get this information from Mombasa.

 Ultimately one of the most important activities for KTDA is to ensure that the monthly payments for the small-scale farmers (over 500,000) are paid on time. Since the system became fully operational in 2005, farmers have never received late payments, making KTDA one of the most successful out grower organizations in Kenya today.

On what it takes to get such an award, Ms Mwende Gatabaki; Group General Manager ICT, quips:

The Award

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