SA firm opens imaging bureau in Luanda

Angola is rated the African continent's star performer after averaging 12% GDP growth over the past eight years - and that, in fact, is faster than China's. However, “While Angola's economic growth has been phenomenal, it has mostly been on the back of oil exports. This underlines the importance of diversifying the economy and explains why the Angolan government has been so supportive of firms like ours that bring previously unheard of skills into the country,” said Ronald Melmed, Managing Director of DAS.

The Luanda bureau is the company's first permanent presence in Angola and comes in the wake of the company last year providing at least 1 000 Open Source Software (OSS) client licenses to the Angolan public sector.

“Our past and ongoing interaction with the Angolan government in the field of scanning and imaging helped us realise the tremendous potential ECM has in Angola's private sector, where millions of hours are wasted annually sorting, storing and retrieving hardcopy documents,” says Melmed.

The company has assisted other companies in setting up scanning and imaging bureaus in African countries including Botswana, Rwanda, Nigeria and Ethiopia, but the Luanda bureau is the first that DAS co-owns and operates outside South Africa. “The Angolan bureau will be used as a base from which to better service the Angolan public and private sectors and will also be useful for prospecting for new business in a booming economy,” explained Melmed.

ECM solutions use scanning and imaging technologies to convert paper documents into electronic data.