George Muiruri, CEO at Phillips International Auctioneers loves his job.
He has done it for many years with numerous lessons and challenges in equal measures.
Pre-COVID-19, a normal work day would mean people – in their hundreds – would flock to their offices to bid for items on auction.
But the past two years, their business, like many others, had to move online. Movement restrictions in the country put a halt to their traditional auctioneering services and they had to think quickly to keep afloat.
An online auction would start but then along the way, during bidding, for example, the system would freeze or crash. To an outsider, this would look suspicious and some would naturally claim that some people were set up to win as others lost.
“The people logged in for the bid would complain there was no transparency and that the system had been compromised. This was occasioned by delayed feedback on whether one had lost or won the bid and there was a communication breakdown as many felt someone was out to sabotage their bidding efforts,” says George.
Phillips International Auctioneers, formerly trading as Leakey’s Auctioneers, is a 22-year-old Kenyan firm that specialises in the sale of property through live and traditional auctions.
The company also repossesses motor vehicles, property used to secure mortgages, and is also involved in the execution of court orders, debt collection and general storage.
While the team at Phillips would try convincing their clients of their straightforwardness, the technological challenges occasioned by online bidding and auctions brewed suspicion and confusion, which led them to re-strategize and seek to get better services.
In 2019, the business began researching e-auctions, with the hope of digitizing their services.
Then COVID-19 hit.
But it couldn’t have been timelier.
George’s team reached out to Safaricom to share their needs, and shortly after, a joint team from both entities developed a tailor-made system that was hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud servers.
Their application allows the product bidder to see a list of the products up for bidding and where to place their bid on select products, an administrator’s login module to manage the live bids and almost zero delays on bid results. The results are sent via email or SMS notification that informs auction bidders whether they’ve won or lost the bid.
This allowed them to also reach global clients and at their convenience.
The service the auctioneer is subscribed to allows for cloud storage and disaster recovery, security, agility and real time monitoring among other services.
The system is more focused on users having a seamless bidding process.
“We can do other things as the auction is ongoing by delegating specific staff members to oversee the live auction instead of involving the whole team,” adds Jacklyne Muchugu, the Finance and Administration Manager at Philips International Auctioneers.
Watch below how the technology is enabling the business to digitise their auction processes.
