By Sami Zaptia.
Tripoli, 6 May 2014:
During the visit of exhibitors at the Taqnya 2014 ICT show that opened yesterday, competing with . . .[restrict]the big billion-plus turnover multi-nationals such as Samsung, Ericsson, ZTE, Alcatel Lucent and Huawei, was a recent Libyan start-up Alashhar Qsystems.
Alashhar Qsystems is the rare, but proud, success story of Libya’s ICT Incubator programme. The ICT Incubator programme (www.ilinc.ly) was established in 2009 as part of the Economic Development Board (EDB) (www.nedb.ly) in order to help provide incubation services – helping young Libyan talent and companies in the ICT sector develop.
Furthermore, Walid Ben Asheher (he spells his name differently to his company name), the owner of Alashhar Qsystem has won a prize, funded by the UK government and implemented by US Mercy Corps, to help his start up operation along.
“I applied online and had to attend an interview. After which I attended a two-week business development training course, which included online mentoring with various mentors. I had to make a presentation to pitch for the funding”, explained Ben Asheher to Libya Herald.
Ben Asheher won LD 26,000 of start-up capital which gave his nascent ideas a huge boost, he enthused. But, he was keen to emphasized, he still has to send in monthly expenses report to his funders for a year.
The Alashhar Qsystem is “a queuing system with a customer flow management system”, Alasheher explained. In other words, it is an audio ticket and queuing system, as can be found in most government offices and banks all over the world, that Alasheher tailor makes for Libyan clients with an Arabic audio. ” A queuing system imported from abroad speaking in another language would not work in Libya”, he explained.
But more than just organizing queuing, the system can give live feedback to management on the rate of flow of work and can highlight bottlenecks and patterns that can help improve performance and customer service, he explained.
“I can customize solutions to specific customers, tailoring to their specific needs. Customizing is my added value. I can provide services to SMEs as well as to large organizations.”, he stressed.
Alashhar Qsystem already enjoys some large clients such as Libya’s Passports Offices across Libya, as well as the Libyan-Swiss clinic and the Masara clinic. He has now achieved turnover “over LD 100,000”, he reluctantly admitted.
Moving forward, the young entrepreneur says he has just linked up with an Italian manufacturer in order to move his business to the next stage.
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