IBM, SAP partner to automate Egypt’s national tax system

IBM Consulting and SAP have joined forces to help the Egyptian Ministry of Finance automate the country’s tax system, as part of the Egyptian government’s digital transformation strategy designed to enhance the country’s business ecosystem and drive forward the national agenda.

To achieve its national vision to maximise public revenues by integrating its informal economy into the formal economy, Egypt’s Ministry of Finance is modernising its current taxation system with plans to automate and digitise the processes and procedures of the Tax Authority.

 “The Ministry is keen to adopt advanced technology in its reform agenda which is why we selected IBM and SAP as partners for the modernization of the tax core system and empowering the e-payments strategy,” says Dr. Mohamed Maait, Egypt’s Minister of Finance.

IBM, in collaboration with SAP, is providing an integrated solution based on the SAP Tax and Revenue Management for Public Sector package. The tailored solution is designed to equip the Ministry of Finance with a comprehensive business operations automation platform to help streamline and automate its business processes into intelligent workflows, enhance collaboration and elevate its citizen experiences.

The system was successfully piloted with 10 tax offices in Greater Cairo and will continue to expand across Egypt later this year.

IBM implemented IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation designed to infuse AI into the Ministry’s processes and provide taxpayers, tax officers and collectors with a smoother, more automated, and well-governed taxation journey. This can enhance accuracy in taxpayers' submissions, drive deeper understanding of the tax process and enable the Ministry to focus on higher-value work like minimising tax evasion and helping increase national tax revenue.

IBM and SAP continue partnership to help organisations digitally transform

This is the latest example of how IBM is collaborating with ecosystem partners like SAP to help clients modernise their infrastructure and address the needs of the hybrid cloud era. IBM has committed to a $1 billion investment in its partner ecosystem over the next three years.

The two tech giants have joined forces multiple times over the last few years, working with hundreds of clients globally on thousands of individual projects, recently partnering with Coca-Cola European Partners, Parle Products, Harmont & Blaine, Puravankara Ltd and Virgin Megastore KSA, to name but a few.

According to Howard Boville, Head of IBM Hybrid Cloud Platform, “the global pandemic has demanded businesses to become digital overnight and quickly adjust to life in a virtual world. Every industry has had to accelerate their transformation and are turning to the cloud to enable that.”

They recently partnered to help the world’s largest Coca-Cola bottler, Coca-Cola European Partners (CCEP), accelerate its transformation to an open hybrid cloud environment, a move designed to reduce CCEP’s operational expenses, increase IT resiliency and leverage analytics and AI in its daily operations – to bring enhanced business insights and deliver greater service. IBM is helping CCEP transform to an IBM hybrid cloud environment including the use of several large SAP workloads.

Last year, the largest selling biscuit brand in India, Parle Products, teamed up with the two technology companies to migrate SAP workloads to IBM Cloud, in a move designed to help it bring its products to market more quickly and effectively. This will help the brand work “uncover new ways to reduce time-to-market and streamline operations”, said Ajay Chauhan, executive director, Parle Products.

Italian clothing brand Harmont & Blaine is also working with IBM and SAP, as it looks to modernise its architecture and make it scalable to support its expansion into international markets. With the aim of modernising its supply chain, retail management and business intelligence, the brand is migrating its IT infrastructure to an SAP-certified environment on IBM Cloud.

IBM and SAP launch new program

Last month, IBM announced it was strengthening its partnership with SAP to help clients move workloads from SAP solutions to the Cloud, making IBM the first partner to offer cloud infrastructure and technical managed services.

The premium supplier option with IBM for RISE with SAP, clients will have the tools to help accelerate the migration of their on-premise SAP software workloads to IBM Cloud, backed by industry-leading security capabilities.

Furthermore, IBM unveiled a new program, Breakthrough with IBM for RISE with SAP, a portfolio of solutions and consulting services that help accelerate and amplify the journey to SAP S/4HANA Cloud. Built on a flexible and scalable platform, the solutions and services use intelligent workflows to streamline operations. They provide an engagement model that helps plan, execute and support holistic business transformation.

Clients are also offered the flexibility and choice to migrate SAP solution workloads to the public cloud with the support of deep industry expertise.