The title that comes to mind and feels very personal is a term coined by SYSPRO’s Cape Town office: “Meryling”. I think this comes about as I can be pretty elusive and abstract but completely on the mark when I need to be. Meryling revolves around mulling, meddling, musing, and finally finding the mark, which makes SYSPRO so successful in Africa.
I have been referred to as creating ‘Merylisms’. Five years ago I said ‘the world cannot afford itself’; many of my intellectual friends have since concurred with this. Tweeting, in a way, is a form of making profound statements, although they sometimes appear trivial. News channels tweet all day long. I see my own young grandson as he forms language, tweeting through the day, negotiating his own survival and creating his personality while doing so. For him every tweet is a crucial conversation.
Many famous people have tweeted long before the term was coined; they just never had the channels we have today. To quote a few: ‘Elvis has left the building’, ‘I want to be alone’ (Greta Garbo) and Marilyn Monroe who, if you study her movies, did nothing else but tweet. It was her sexual, comical persona that made her famous in her very short lifetime. The power of the tweet for Oscar Pistorius a few weekends ago, after having been in and out of the South African men’s relay team at the world athletics championship, tweeted: ‘I am gutted’. Amy Winehouse: “They tried to make me go to rehab, I said no, no, no.” Prophetically she anticipated her own, premature death.
I share my thinking, as I take the idea of blogging very personally. I will not sign off anything unless I believe it reflects the essence of who I am. My authenticity is what the customers like and what all my staff strive for.
In the true spirit of SYSPRO, Simplifying your Success is our key tweet to the customer. This all happens through ‘Team SYSPRO’ and through the right selection and appointment of the best ‘Seekers of Value’.
Mark Aindow of Fresenius Kabi, Africa’s leading provider of products for nutrition and infusion therapy, is a perfect example of a great Seeker of Value. In January 2009 Mark was made Financial and IT Director for Africa. In 2007 Mark completed the upgrade of SAP R/3 4.6C at a Fresenius’ European facility. This year in the Fresenius operation in Africa, Mark embraced all the principles of SYSPRO Process Modeling and in four months reinvented his business processes, refocused his staff’s KPIs and completed a SYSPRO upgrade to 6.1. Mark is what is considered to be a true Seeker of Value; embracing and creating sustainable ERP for his organisation. His organisation is required to meet all the stringent standards required by the various medical councils. SYSPRO’s Process Modeling module and the tweet behind the invaluable concept: one source of the truth can be referred to by the CEO or any other member of an organisation.
