The challenge
DCL Laboratory Products is an in vitro diagnostics company that operates in several West African countries. In Ghana, as in Nigeria, it supplies medical and laboratory equipment, reagents and consumables to hospitals, laboratories and clinics, and supports installed equipment with installation, training and maintenance.
Running the same kind of business in a second country adds its own requirements:
- A separate legal and tax setting. Ghana has its own currency, tax rules and reporting, so the operation needs its own books rather than a copy of another country's.
- Local stock and local customers, with purchasing, receiving, sales and collections handled in-country.
- Consistency with the wider business. Items, processes and reports should look familiar across countries, so that management can compare them and staff can move between them.
- Batch and expiry control for reagents and consumables, and clear records of equipment supplied to each customer.
Without a shared system design, each country tends to build its own spreadsheets and workarounds, and the numbers stop being comparable.
What we implemented
Promatics deployed Prometheus, our ERP built on the open-source ERPNext platform, as the business system for DCL's operation in Ghana.
Prometheus brings accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, CRM, administration and human resource management into one system. For distribution businesses, the platform includes:
- inventory control across warehouses and stores;
- batch-managed items, returns and credit notes;
- landed cost vouchers, taxes and charges, and multi-currency accounting;
- automated stock replenishment, reorder levels and material requests.
Because ERPNext supports multiple companies, currencies and tax settings, one platform can serve several country operations while keeping each set of books separate. This summary records the deployment at the level we can confirm publicly; it does not list every module configured.
Results
The project was completed as a Prometheus deployment for DCL Laboratory Products in Ghana, alongside the Prometheus deployment for DCL Laboratory Products in Nigeria.
We have not published measured outcomes for this project, and we do not add figures after the fact.
What this means for your organisation
Many Nigerian businesses operate across more than one jurisdiction: a head office in Lagos or Abuja with a subsidiary in Ghana or another ECOWAS country, branches in several states with their own levies, or a regional operation trading in more than one currency. The lesson from a multi-country deployment applies directly.
- Design once, configure per entity. Agree the shared item catalogue, processes and reports first, then configure each company, currency and tax setting separately.
- Keep books separate, reporting comparable. Each entity keeps its own ledger, while management reports use the same structure across all of them.
- Plan local requirements early. Tax documents, print formats and customer-facing forms differ from one country to the next, and they are easier to build in than to add later.
- Choose hosting deliberately. Prometheus can run in a local data centre in Lagos or Abuja, in a cloud region abroad, or on premises. The choice should follow the NDPA's rules on transfers outside Nigeria and any sector rules that apply.
If you are adding a second entity, state or country to your operations, see Prometheus ERP, our ERP implementation service and our article on supply chain systems that support growth, or contact us.