The Nama Story: An ERP Built from the Reality of Work

Nama did not begin with a long feature list, nor with the idea of making another version of an existing system. It began with experience we had lived ourselves: recurring problems in ERP systems, real business needs that did not always find a willing listener, and a belief that we could build something better if we started with the right foundations.

The beginning: five founders and complementary experience

Namasoft was founded in 2011 by five partners who had worked together in enterprise resource planning: Ameer Gaafar, Ahmed Qasid, Mohammed Foly, Yasser Gad and Walid Ismail.

Ameer had taught and mentored Ahmed and Mohammed, and brought ERP experience reaching back to the 1990s. Ahmed and Mohammed were accomplished software engineers. Yasser added deep accounting and management experience, along with a practical understanding of how companies operate, while Walid brought his knowledge of sales and the market. The team did not all think alike, and that became one of its strengths: engineering expertise, business understanding, market knowledge and a clear view of what customers actually needed.

The question was not, “What is the fastest product we can put on the market?” It was the harder question: “What foundation will allow this product to live and evolve for years?”

Yasser Gad proposed the name “Nama”, from the Arabic word for growth. It was easy to pronounce in both Arabic and English, it carried the meaning we wanted for the company and its product, and the namasoft.com domain was available. Many names were considered, but the whole team agreed that Namasoft was the best one.

The partners funded the company themselves and worked without salaries for a considerable period. When the initial funding ran out before the product was complete, they invested again. This was not simply a commercial bet that could be abandoned easily. From the first day, Namasoft was their life’s project.

The company started in an apartment in Ibn Al-Waleed Square in Dokki, with only three employees in addition to the founders. The premises were modest. What was being built inside them was ambitious from the outset.

We chose Java and decided that Nama would run on the web at a time when desktop applications still dominated the market. We then spent nearly two years building the system’s infrastructure before the product emerged in a form users could see. We applied everything we had learned from previous systems: where processes fail, where costing becomes complicated, how posting and unposting create everyday problems, and what multi-company and multi-currency groups need.

From the beginning, we made decisions that were largely invisible to customers but shaped everything that followed. We separated the user interface from the business logic, so the correctness of a calculation would never depend on the screen through which data was entered. We designed the system on the assumption that a document might originate in our own interface, an online store or an external service. We also moved transaction processing into a separate queue, allowing the system to handle thousands of operations from branches, points of sale and connected platforms without leaving users waiting at their screens.

We were building for the future before we had many examples from the present to show.

The first real test

The first practical test of this foundation came in 2012, with a document management and archiving project for ECPAs, the practice founded by Ashraf Hagar and later a Namasoft partner. The practice offers the system to its customers under the name Capital Solutions ERP.

We designed a system to manage the document lifecycle: scanning, storage, check-in and check-out, and transfer from one location to another. It was a small product compared with what Nama would later become, but it was the first real product to use the infrastructure and interface we were building. We learned a great deal from it, and the same product eventually became the Document Management System, or DMS, within Nama ERP.

It was the first proof that the foundation worked. The bigger test was still ahead.

A major customer before the journey was complete

In 2013, we signed Al Shitaa & Al Saif in Saudi Arabia, a major electrical-appliance retailer and the first customer to implement the full Nama ERP system. Ibrahim Al Khodair, known to us as Abu Faisal, placed his trust in us at an early stage in the product’s life. That trust had a profound effect on Nama’s journey.

Al Shitaa & Al Saif’s requirements were broad and complex: sales and purchasing, costing, supplier discounts, item coding, price lists and multiple branches, as well as human resources. In Mohamed Riyadh, the company’s managing director at the time, we found a partner who understood the operation and shared its details with us.

We did not simply send an implementation team to record requirements. The developers themselves, including Ahmed Qasid and Mohammed Foly, travelled to Riyadh, Jeddah and Qassim. We sat with users, watched how barcodes were handled, followed the movement of goods, saw where time was being lost and learned what employees actually needed to do their work. We wanted to see each problem through the eyes of the person living with it every day.

The system went live on 1 January 2014. The project gave Nama a strong core for supply chain, retail and human resources. The customer was not merely an organisation buying a product; the reality of its operation became part of the product’s own development.

From serial numbers to shipments and expiry dates

After retail and electrical appliances, we entered food distribution with the Egyptian Group for Trading and its companies. Hany Youssef was — and remains — a partner in the success of that journey. Here we encountered a natural gap: a system first shaped around products identified by serial numbers now needed to manage shipments and expiry dates with equal precision.

Adding shipments could have required a painful change at the heart of the system. Instead, the quality of the foundation in which we had invested allowed us to add the capability coherently. The implementation succeeded, and referrals soon brought other customers from the same sector.

The pharmaceutical sector came next. The first conversation was about implementing inventory alone, but it opened a wider door: why not include sales, purchasing, HR and manufacturing as well? The manufacturing module was still new, while material requirements planning, or MRP, was on our roadmap but not yet complete. We studied the requirement with the customer, built it and produced a strong module that became a core part of Nama.

A pattern emerged that would remain with us: Nama enters a sector with its core capabilities, then listens to the details only people in that industry can know. That new expertise becomes part of the product, benefiting both the customer who helped shape it and the customer who comes next.

Growth meant more than geography

Following the success in Saudi Arabia, Namasoft established its Saudi branch in 2016 in partnership with Ibrahim Al Khodair and Al Khodair Holding Group, extending our reach in the Gulf. Yet the most important growth was not the number of cities in which we operated. It was the variety of businesses the system could now manage.

Real-estate customers came to us because they liked what they found in finance and HR, but they also needed sales and lease management. We built the real-estate investment module with them.

Then a customer in Saudi Arabia that built its own projects discovered that we already understood the foundations of contracting. Its response was simple: let us build it together. That collaboration produced the contracting module now used by many companies in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

In the automotive sector, Xpress Group and Ragy Hassan had a particular influence. He valued our way of working and our responsiveness, and brought precise requirements from vehicle sales, service and maintenance. His experience and pragmatic approach helped shape the automotive module until Nama became a strong choice for service centres and vehicle dealerships.

Nama’s modules therefore developed in step with one another. Manufacturing grew on the factory floor, contracting on the project site, automotive in the service centre and retail at the point of sale. Each industry left real expertise in the product, and that expertise then travelled to the next customer.

Why we listen

Over time, Nama came to cover most of a customer’s requirements before configuration began. But the remaining twenty percent — the details that distinguish one company from another — remained important to us.

Our policy was never to tell a customer to manage that part in Excel or find another system for it. We listen first and try to understand the reason behind the request, then build the solution in a way that serves the immediate need while remaining useful to other customers. An improvement requested by one customer can become shared experience in the next release, benefiting hundreds of others.

This is why a large share of Namasoft’s sales has always come through referrals. Customers do not recommend the system because they heard a marketing promise. They recommend it because they saw a team listen, a product evolve with them and a benefit that grows as the system’s community expands.

Partners, not merely resellers

From the beginning, we have believed in trading expertise with partners of real calibre. A partner close to the customer — one who understands its business and market — can offer greater value.

The model began with Ashraf Hagar and ECPAs. After the archiving project, the practice adopted sales, human resources, time management and project management. It then began recommending the system to its customers after seeing the difference it made to audit and tax work. Once it had built a team that knew how to implement the product, ECPAs became Namasoft’s first formal reseller and began offering it to customers as Capital Solutions ERP.

The model was repeated in Kuwait through Exceed ERP and with former colleagues whom we encouraged to build companies of their own. Ahmed Farouk, founder of SoftVision, was one of them. We believed he had the ability to sell, implement and build a team, so we encouraged him to establish an independent business. Other partnerships followed in different cities, including our work with Ahmed Hashem in Kafr El Sheikh, where being close to customers makes a difference a distant central branch cannot make on its own.

Through this model, the community reached major customers such as Al Kasrawy Group. Partners also contributed to specialised projects, including a freight management system for Falcon Freight Group in Alexandria.

Nama partners do more than sell usage licences. They take part in requirements gathering, implementation and support, and sometimes help shape what the product needs next. We therefore see them as partners in building the Nama community, not simply as a sales channel.

From a Dokki apartment to a community larger than the company

As the team grew, Namasoft moved to a larger apartment on Michel Bakhoum Street in Dokki, then to larger premises in Oman Square. Today, the company works from an entire villa it owns in Mohandessin. The garden may sound like a small detail in the story of a software company, but it has made a genuine difference to employees: a place to step away from screens and pressure, and a daily reminder that the company’s growth should improve the lives of the people building it.

Namasoft began with three employees alongside its founders. Today, more than 200 people work across its branches and network of independent partners. Growth here does not mean the expansion of one central organisation alone. It means a widening community of teams and companies that understand the system, sell it, implement it and support it.

The founders’ experience has been there from the start, and it is there still. Ameer Gaafar continued his role in the journey for more than a decade before beginning a new professional chapter at Google in February 2022. The expertise and engineering decisions he established with his colleagues are still part of the foundation on which Nama continues to build.

Today, Ahmed Qasid is Namasoft’s Managing Director and Development Manager, while Yasser Gad serves as Chairman. Mohammed Foly and Walid Ismail continue to follow the company’s work, provide advice and assistance, and take part in periodic meetings in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The founders’ experience has therefore never left the company, even as the form of their involvement has evolved.

Our ambitions do not end here

Today, Nama serves more than 700 customers and over 10,000 users across companies that differ in size and in the nature of their work. It has grown from a finance and trade core into a broad platform of more than fifty modules, integrated with online stores, platforms and external services, and improved through regular releases.

Yet the numbers are not the most important part of the story. What matters is that Namasoft still follows the principles with which it began: build on a technical foundation that can change, stay close to the reality of work, listen before deciding, and never treat after-sales service as something separate from the product.

In the next phase, Namasoft is not pursuing growth simply to add larger numbers. Our priorities are greater stability and scalability, coverage for more specialised industries, and stronger technical support and implementation teams. Real value is not created when a customer merely owns the software. It is created when that customer can use it properly in everyday work.

That is why we continue to document every part of the system and make this knowledge easier for employees and customers to access. We have also turned to artificial intelligence to understand the detail of Nama’s systems precisely. Used that way, it helps us give a more exact account of what the system does, more easily and more quickly: users and prospective customers can find out about Nama at any time and from anywhere by asking an AI model, rather than working through traditional documentation that does not answer easily across a system this wide.

Nama’s systems were not built in a handful of months in pursuit of a quick return.

This is the Nama story as we see it: a product designed from the outset within an Arab culture, resting on expertise built over decades, open to what the market asks of it and eager for whatever comes next.