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Ridwaan Boda Head of TMT Practice, ENS

ENSis a leading firm at the forefront of legal, tax, forensics, and intellectual property services across Africa. With offices in Eastern, Southern, and Western Africa, and over 600 practitioners specialising in all commercial areas, the firm has deep expertise and the capacity to deliver on clients’ business requirements, helping them navigate regulatory hurdles, no matter where in Africa they do business.

Ridwaan Boda, who heads up the firm’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) division, says there is no doubting the relevance of legal contracts within the highvalue, high-complex ERP implementation space.

Boda says that these implementations are typically determined by the size of the customer, the number of users, the digital footprint, the number of departments, the number of countries, the amount of data and the actual spend on setting up and running the ERP.

He believes that in the discussion about legal contracts within ERP that continue to migrate to the cloud, two questions need to be considered: what is the impact of ERP on legal contracts? And, more importantly, how do legal contracts influence the outcome of ERP?

“On the first question, if your ERP system is designed in a way that requires standard templates to utilised for specific types of transactions (such as a Purchase Order), the system needs to be intelligent enough to generate the correct template, complete the information accurately and the template itself needs to be expertly crafted,” says Boda.

“On the second question, a bad ERP implementation experience usually begins with a poorly drafted contract. A great contract will not only seek to allocate responsibility if something goes wrong, but, more importantly, it will have the tools in place to ensure that neither party is put in a situation where the discussion is about who is at fault, but, rather, gives both parties a common understanding on the services, deliverables, pricing, penalties, governance, and timelines, and will ensure that these prevent arguments rather than creating them,” he adds. Legally sound contracts ensure there are sufficient remedies and mechanisms to ensure that an ERP implementation partner comes in on time, within budget and with minimal ‘drama’.

The success of an ERP project lies in appointing the correct subject matter experts throughout the process, from idea, to implementation, to ongoing service delivery.

From a legal perspective, lawyers are not meant to be brought in when the parties are at loggerheads during issues experienced in the implementation phase or ongoing service delivery phases but should rather be brought in upfront to ensure that the contract is drafted in a manner that will actually prevent such issues from occurring.

“Essentially, a well-crafted agreement will ensure that a customer does not take on more risk than vendors would usually seek to pass on to them and it will ensure that the contract not only provides for mechanisms that result in direct and indirect commercial savings, but is also technically sound,” Boda says.

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