Re-Connect For Good Practices On The Sustainable Circular Economy Journey.

Upande Ltd is a private Kenyan social enterprise founded in 2009.  We develop digital platforms which track assets including facilities, businesses, farms, utilities, and key infrastructure. Every asset is digitized and can be monitored, maintained and accounted for on our platforms. Upande provides smart devices that collect live data on the conditions in the field and can be used to trigger changes remotely. This gives our customers the power to manage operations from anywhere in the world from the palm of their hand.

Our data-centric products and services aim to empower our customers’ performance by helping achieve loss reduction, increased production/revenue opportunities, and market size expansion in an almost live time setting.

Amongst others and more of our achievements, we have been able to install sensor devices for various farms, this has improved their productivity, quality, quantity, and efficiency of products thanks to real-time monitoring and prediction systems.

Sustainable development has been the overarching goal for Upande, for water security. We have been able to deploy some devices in various parts of Kenya to ensure the availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation.

The internally displaced people in these areas are able to access well-treated clean water reliably without downtime in water provision. The Upande sensors are easy to operate and are affordable offline tools, which allow local partners to maintain their own setup without external support.

UpandeERP is an enterprise resource planning tool that has welcome efficiencies to most organizations. It has enabled people to work more digitally, together, online, from home, and from anywhere. ERP features like HR & Payroll, BoM, Projects, Smart asset Management, CRM, etc. help you to track and manage all your business operations under one roof.

Some of the challenges we face are:

1. Lack of transparency among some customers’ staff. In cases where staff secretly benefit from current operations, they try to sabotage any new system that has an audit trail that could make them not continue benefiting.
2. Illiteracy level among most farmers and their staff hence not tech-savvy and not ready to embrace technology or adopt an advanced solution to manage and make their operations efficient.
3. Customer tailored customizations. Every customer has their own customization needs yet most of them are not willing to foot the cost of the customization.
4. Late payment or payment default. Most farmers are perennial, therefore there are some periods before harvest when they can’t afford to pay. Whereas it is like a culture for most water companies to default or make late payments.
5. Inadequate resources. Our UpandeERP is web-based hence online with a better desktop interface whereas some farmers and small water utility companies could be willing to use the solution but they lack the required resources like a computer, internet etc.

Ambitions

1. We aim to ensure every customer using our products reduces losses and achieves sustainable optimal performance through our smart asset management solution through data-driven decisions.
2. We aim to carry out Market Research for all our products and modules by the end of 2022.
3. We aim to increase our turnover by 5 times to $2 million and increase our gross margins from 5% to 25% by the end of 2022.
4. We aim to better know our customers by tracking their usage of our tools.
5. We aim to make our customers happy by following our Standard Operating Procedures to ensure customer issues are well tracked and resolved on time.
6. We will digitize/transform the aquaculture value chain and transform by 2022.
7. We will be serving 10 flower farmers with our sensor services by the end of 2022.
8. We will be serving 20 companies with our UpandeERP by the end of 2022.
9. We will be serving 15 customers with sensors, UpandeERP subscription and SLA by the end of 2022. These are very important and unique clients that fall under the 3S (Sensors, Software and Smart Modules),  our main focus.
10. We aim to fully go commercial and depend on revenue streams from our product subscriptions by the end of 2024.

For more information, visit our website or you can contact us at +254726428166.