03.02.2009

Laying the Ground for Growth

Latin America’s construction boom shows no signs of slowing, and building materials are big business. Alfagres, Colombia’s largest supplier of building materials, is profiting from the strong market.

Fast and global expansion is every entrepreneur’s dream. If companies do not want their bubble to burst, however, they need to take specific measures to sustain their growth. Their business processes and IT infrastructure need to keep up with the speed of change. Alfagres, Colombia’s largest building material supplier, knows this all too well. With an average growth rate of 20% over the last five years, the company was facing a twofold problem: no end-to-end data flow along its value chain and an inadequate information system.

“It was getting harder to keep up with our foreign business and still be efficient,” says Doris Ladino, IT project manager at Alfagres. Too often, manual steps slowed down decision-making processes. “That ultimately hurt our competitiveness.” Because Alfagres did not always have the information it needed, high inventories blighted some areas of the business, while stock-outs caused problems elsewhere. The company could not effectively monitor its processes and make reliable forecasts.

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