Bernard Aldebert, MD, Symtrax.

International digital document and workflow innovator Symtrax has turned its attention to South Africa, bringing key solutions to market to address growing local challenges.

Symtrax, with solutions to simplify and improve ERP, BPM or CRM document workflows, has long supported major enterprises across Africa, and now sees a gap in the South African market for solutions such as its Outbound EDI with API capabilities, E-Signature and E-Invoicing solutions.

Bernard Aldebert, Managing Director of Symtrax, says the company has long supported organisations in Francophone Africa out of its Nîmes office, while English-speaking African countries and South Africa will be supported out of the London office.

“We now see growing demand coming out of South Africa as companies face challenges such as adding value and enhancing their ERP investments, building more efficiencies into their workflows, aligning with international formats and improving security around document workflows," he says.

Aldebert says demand for Symtrax E-Invoicing is growing as governments seek greater transparency on VAT, expenses and tax reporting. E-Invoicing also supports export and international business and levels the playing field for smaller businesses trading with large enterprises, he notes.

Symtrax E-Invoicing is a turnkey automated electronic invoicing solution that is adaptable to international platforms and works with all leading formats.

Symtrax E-Signature and corporately deployed solution WebSign also support the needs of South Africans and Africans to move away from manual processes. The WebSign digital signature solution, coupled with Symtrax Compleo Robotic Process Automation (RPA), helps optimise e-signature tasks into fully automated workflows.

Aldebert says e-signatures are not only applicable to legal documents, but can also be deployed to fast-track thousands of processes across the enterprise. E-signature integration into existing business processes removes time-consuming manual processes, improves security and reduces the risk of fraud, he says.

“E-signatures have to be part of overall digitisation. Manual signatures can interrupt a project or workflow, so e-signatures need to be integrated into all processes,” he says. “One major goal of e-signatures is that they don’t only serve as confirmation or authorisation – they also legitimise the document.”

As organisations increasingly depend on Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for business to business (B2B) or business to government (B2G) ordering of goods or services, many are finding the technology expensive and cumbersome to use. In addition, formats and standards for these processes may change over time, meaning older EDI must be modernised to become more adaptable.

“Large enterprises often force smaller players to adopt EDI solutions to be compliant, but this is costly for smaller businesses. This is why newer technology such as APIs is taking over – it’s easier to implement and maintain, and helps set up a smooth integration at a much lower cost,” Aldebert says.

Symtrax Outbound EDI with advanced API capabilities allows organisations to modernise their EDI processes to qualify partners faster and secure their supply chain workflows. It allows organisations to remain independent from partner systems and network changes while still supporting common protocols, secure exchanges and improved communication.

Says Aldebert: “All organisations want to beef up the security in their processes and ensure that they are better protected. When they exchange information through an EDI API, they know it is secure, they have the credentials of the people they are dealing with, so they are better protected.”

Symtrax, first launched in Nîmes, France, in 1989, is now represented in the US, UK, Germany and India, with customers worldwide. With strong global growth in the past two years, the company last year announced it was setting its sights on developing its customer bases in India, Germany, Greece, Saudi Arabia and specific areas of Africa, including South Africa, Egypt and French-speaking Northern Africa.