The problem

Rubavu Household runs four retail stores across the Western Province. Until mid-2024, Patrick — the operations director — started every day with four phone calls. Each branch manager would read off stock counts from the previous night’s walk-through.

By the time the four calls were done, the numbers were already stale. Worse, each branch had drifted into its own pricing conventions, and ‘transfer stock between branches’ meant ‘put it in the pickup, call me when it arrives, write it down if you remember.’

Why GwizaSuite

Patrick was looking for a multi-branch system that spoke Rwandan retail, not a repurposed US chain-store ERP. The two-step transfer confirmation pattern was the feature that sealed it — it meant shrinkage would be visible the moment it happened, not at the annual stock-take.

Implementation

Four branches rolled out over six weeks. The Gisenyi store went first as a pilot. By week six all four were live and the daily phone calls had stopped.

90 days in

Patrick now opens the dashboard on his phone before breakfast. Stock, cash position, overdue invoices, pending transfers — all four branches, one screen. He hasn’t made a daily status call in over a year.

The phone calls were a symptom. The real problem was that I didn’t trust my own numbers. Trust came back the week we stopped the calls.— Patrick Mugisha, Operations Director, Rubavu Household