When Oracle recently surpassed SAP as the world’s top ERP provider, it marked more than just a shift in market leadership. It signalled a deeper transformation now playing out in boardrooms and back offices across the globe: the future of enterprise systems is cloud-based, agile, and deeply attuned to local context.

As reported by CIO.com, this changing of the guard is more than a tech milestone — it’s a moment of reflection and opportunity, especially for Africa. It invites a critical question: Should the continent continue to rely on legacy systems designed elsewhere, or build solutions tailored to its own realities?

Nowhere is this question more urgent than in Africa.

Over the past two decades, African innovation has flipped the global script. Kenya pioneered mobile money with M-PESA. Fintech giants like Flutterwave and Chipper Cash are revolutionising cross-border payments. Edtech, agritech, logistics, HR tech, all are filling long-standing infrastructure gaps with bold, homegrown solutions. The continent is no longer waiting for global tech to trickle down — it’s building from the ground up.

However, one domain remains ripe for disruption: enterprise resource planning (ERP) and procurement systems.

Enterprise Software Hasn’t Kept Up with African Realities

Despite the transformative shifts in African business and public service, most ERP systems remain rigid, expensive, and imported. These tools were built for economies with different infrastructures, regulatory frameworks, and user needs. Their implementation often requires deep technical teams, years of configuration, and millions in upfront fees.

Worse, they exclude more than they include — sidelining local suppliers, missing out on informal sector dynamics, and struggling to support public procurement’s demands for compliance, transparency, and inclusion.

To be clear: this isn’t a rejection of global ERP systems like Oracle or SAP. They are powerful tools that serve many large global enterprises well. But in the African context, they often prove to be overbuilt, underutilised, and costly to deploy. In many cases, organisations find themselves paying for complexity they don’t need, or forced into workflows that don’t reflect local operations.

What we’re saying is this: Africa deserves options — tools that are fit for purpose, locally rooted, and flexible enough to grow with the organisations using them.

Introducing Scale — Africa’s Procurement System, Built for African Realities

Scale is a cloud-based e-procurement and ERP platform, built from the ground up to serve Africa’s diverse, complex, and fast-moving organisations. Where legacy ERPs were built for yesterday’s world, Scale was born from the actual frustrations of African procurement teams — navigating manual paperwork, disconnected suppliers, unclear approvals, and endless compliance hurdles.

Here’s what makes Scale different:

🌍 Cloud-First, API-Ready

Like Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP, Scale is built for the cloud — accessible anywhere, updated seamlessly, and designed to integrate with tools like QuickBooks, SAP, or national compliance systems like eTIMS. No servers. No drawn-out installations. Just immediate value.

📦 Designed for Procurement Teams

Scale digitises the full procurement lifecycle — from supplier prequalification to RFx management, purchase orders, contract tracking, and performance reviews. It saves procurement officers 20+ hours a week while unlocking real-time visibility for finance teams and decision-makers.

💡 Affordable, Flexible, Inclusive

Scale flips the global pricing model on its head. Our subscription model works for SMEs and scales up to support large institutions, with transparent pricing and no hidden costs. More importantly, Scale empowers inclusion, enabling procurement teams to track and onboard women-owned, youth-owned, and PWD-owned businesses with ease.

🌱 Built for Africa, Not Just in Africa

From supplier diversity targets and public sector frameworks to informal workflows and inconsistent internet access — Scale is not a copy-paste of foreign software. It’s a response to local pain points, designed to evolve with each market’s needs.

Already Delivering Results

Scale is already trusted by forward-thinking organisations across the continent — including Nation Media Group, SunCulture, Galana Energies, Davis & Shirtliff, Amani, Pawa 254 and JEFAG (Tanzania). We’ve helped them digitise supplier onboarding, streamline sourcing, ensure compliance, and centralise procurement records — all in record time.

Why This Moment Matters — and Why Africa Can’t Wait

Oracle’s ascent past SAP didn’t happen by accident. It was fuelled by bold bets on cloud innovation, automation, and customer-centric platforms. These are the same forces reshaping how African organisations must operate.

But the lesson here isn’t that Africa should now adopt Oracle. It’s that Africa has the opportunity — and the capability — to build its own enterprise solutions.

We’ve done it in payments. We’ve done it in logistics. Now it’s ERP’s turn.

Just as Safaricom reimagined how money moves, and Twiga Foods reimagined how food moves, Scale is reimagining how procurement works — transparently, efficiently, and inclusively.

From Nairobi to Lagos, Kigali to Accra, the problems may differ slightly, but the solution is clear: Africa needs systems that reflect its realities, not retrofitted versions of someone else’s software.

Beyond Digitisation — Toward Sovereignty, Efficiency, and Scale

This is bigger than software. It’s about sovereignty, competitiveness, and resilience. Every time a government or business depends on foreign ERP tools that don’t fit, they lose efficiency, but they also lose control. Local innovation is not just a better fit, it’s a strategic imperative.

Scale doesn’t just digitise procurement. It formalises trust. It expands opportunity. It accelerates delivery. And it does it all with simplicity, speed, and clarity.

A Rallying Call: Africa Can Build This

Africa has already proven it can lead global tech conversations. The ERP revolution doesn’t need to be imported. It can — and should — be led by African founders, developers, public servants, and procurement champions.

Scale is one piece of that future.
Let’s build the rest together.