The challenge
DCL Laboratory Products is an in vitro diagnostics company operating in Nigeria and elsewhere in West Africa. In Nigeria it supplies medical and laboratory equipment, reagents and consumables to hospitals, laboratories and clinics, and supports the equipment it places with installation, training and maintenance.
A distributor of this kind runs several connected operations at the same time:
- Buying and importing equipment and consumables from international manufacturers, often in foreign currencies.
- Holding stock that needs careful control, including reagents and consumables tracked by batch and expiry date.
- Selling to a mix of public and private healthcare customers, with quotes, orders, deliveries, invoices and collections.
- Servicing installed equipment, which means knowing what was supplied to whom and when.
- Running the business itself: accounting, people and administration.
When these activities sit in separate spreadsheets and tools, the same customer, item or order is entered several times, and nobody has a single, current view of stock, sales and money.
What we implemented
Promatics deployed Prometheus, our ERP built on the open-source ERPNext platform, as the central business system for DCL's Nigerian operation.
Prometheus is designed to bring accounting, sales, purchasing, inventory, CRM, administration and human resource management into one system, so that a sale, a stock movement and the matching accounting entries come from the same records. 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.
This summary records the deployment at the level we can confirm publicly. It does not list every module configured or every process changed.
Results
The project was completed as a Prometheus deployment for DCL Laboratory Products in Nigeria. Promatics also deployed Prometheus for DCL Laboratory Products in Ghana.
We have not published measured outcomes for this project, and we do not add figures after the fact.
What this means for your organisation
Nigerian distributors of laboratory, medical and scientific products face the same core problem: purchasing, stock, sales, service and finance need to agree with each other. The approach used here is a home-market example, and it carries over directly to similar businesses across Nigeria and West Africa.
- One system of record. Items, customers, suppliers, prices and stock live in one place, and each transaction posts to the accounts as it happens.
- Batch and expiry control. Tracking consumables by batch makes it practical to answer recall and quality questions quickly, which supports the traceability expected by regulators such as NAFDAC.
- Import costs that land correctly. Freight, duties and clearing charges can be allocated to stock through landed cost vouchers, which matters for goods cleared through the Nigeria Customs Service.
- Nigerian tax and currency. VAT and withholding tax settings, plus US dollar purchasing against naira books, are configured rather than worked around.
- Hosting you control. Prometheus can run in a local data centre in Lagos or Abuja, in a cloud region abroad, or on premises. Where you host should follow the NDPA's rules on transfers outside Nigeria (the choice helps, but it does not settle every data question on its own).
If you distribute regulated or batch-tracked products and your systems no longer agree, see Prometheus ERP, our ERP implementation service and our work with distribution and retail organisations, or contact us to talk it through.