8 business functions, one ERP blueprint for Tanzania's national telco

Tanzania Telecommunications Corporation (TTCL) is the country’s national telco, established by Act of Parliament as its strategic telecommunications provider. Through my consultancy Jenga Tech Consulting, working as a sub-contracted partner, I served as Project Coordinator for Phase 1 of TTCL’s ERP transformation: the pre-implementation phase that took the corporation from fragmented processes to a complete requirements specification, a compliant procurement, and an 18-month implementation roadmap.

The challenge

TTCL’s 3-year Strategic Plan (2025/26–2027/28) committed the corporation to modernizing how it operates. The reality on the ground: no integrated IT backbone. Finance, customer relationship management, sales and distribution, supply chain, inventory, project management, HR, and enterprise performance management each ran on their own fragmented processes and disconnected applications. For a corporation with a statutory mandate as Tanzania’s leading communications service provider, and a role in the national digital economy agenda, that fragmentation was a ceiling.

The fix was not simply “buy an ERP.” Telecom is one of the harder industries to bring an ERP into, because the ERP is never the whole system: it has to sit alongside OSS/BSS, billing platforms, and FRAMS, and the boundaries between them have to be drawn deliberately, in advance. And as a public corporation, TTCL procures under Tanzania’s Public Procurement Act, which means requirements, evaluation criteria, and architecture must be settled before the RFP goes out, not negotiated with a vendor afterwards. Many ERP programs fail exactly here, in the work that happens before any software is bought.

The approach

The engagement was structured in two phases; I managed Phase 1, pre-implementation, coordinating the consulting team’s work across four streams.

As-is assessment. We evaluated TTCL’s organizational structure, business processes, IT infrastructure, and software applications across all eight business functions, documenting pain points, dependencies, and integration requirements with the telecom systems already in production.

Business process re-engineering. Rather than automating the existing processes as found, we redesigned them for the target operating model, with organizational structure recommendations to match. An ERP configured around broken processes just makes the broken processes faster.

Requirements engineering. I oversaw creation of the Functional Requirements Specification for all core ERP modules, aligned with telecommunications industry practice, and coordinated the Enterprise Architecture design using established models: a documented current state and an explicit target state.

Procurement and vendor selection. We prepared the ERP procurement RFP in compliance with the Public Procurement Act, provided technical assistance through vendor evaluation, scoring, and selection, and developed an 18-month implementation roadmap with milestones.

The outcome

Phase 1 closed with TTCL holding everything it needs to implement with its eyes open:

• A current-state assessment across all eight business functions, with processes, pain points, and integration requirements documented rather than assumed.
• Redesigned business processes and organizational recommendations for the digital operating model.
• A complete Functional Requirements Specification for a telecom-specific ERP, Finance through Enterprise Performance Management, including integration with OSS/BSS, billing platforms, and FRAMS.
• An Enterprise Architecture blueprint defining the target state.
• Procurement documentation compliant with Tanzanian law, and a vendor selection framework that carried TTCL through evaluation and scoring.
• An 18-month implementation roadmap with milestones.

I frame this engagement the way pre-implementation work deserves to be framed: the transformation itself is delivered in Phase 2, on top of this foundation, and the quality of Phase 1 shows up in how implementation goes. What this phase bought TTCL is the thing ERP programs most often skip: a requirements baseline and an architecture the corporation owns, so vendor selection became a comparison against TTCL’s documented needs rather than a choice between sales decks.