S.A. Al Rajhi Holding Company, one of the top 100 Saudi businesses, has implemented Sage Line 500 ERP to integrate the operations of its seven different companies, as part of its ongoing growth management strategy. Al Rajhi, ranked number 27 in the Saudi top 100, is using Sage ERP to speed up back-office operations, eliminate redundancy and duplicate data, to ultimately improve quality, customer service and reduce costs.
“With around 10,000 employees in seven subsidiaries, our operational processes are growing significantly and this created an urgent need to integrate the Holding company’s information management system,” said Dr. Zeyad Al Hekail, general manager, information technology, Al Rajhi Holding. “The first implementation within the group was for Al Watania Industries. This was gradually expanded to the remaining divisions, to help organize the communication and business processes both internally, and externally as reflected in our service to customers. Our priority was ease and speed of implementation, without having to spend too much time customizing. A team of 11 consultants from Al Rajhi’s IT team were heavily involved with Sage partner consultants. The result was that the Sage ERP replaced several other systems, enhancing the entire business process within the group.”
Al Rajhi today has 120 concurrent Sage ERP users and 1200 named users. Prior to the implementation, each department functioned as a stand-alone unit. The Sage ERP is allowing all departments such as finance, logistics, procurement, production, sales, marketing and engineering to function as one entity. With Sage ERP, all the group’s divisions can monitor the stock in various warehouses spread across a hundred kilometers where physical verification is difficult. The company can see exactly which items are in stock in each location and which items have been ordered.
Dr. Al Hekail continued: “This helps to plan future purchases. Watania Agriculture is using Sage Project Accounting to track all costs including material and labour related to projects such as Green Houses for crops, and animal farms. The company also uses Sage purchase requisitions to streamline purchasing.”
Other noteworthy benefits include the use of Sage Business Intelligence (BI) and pivot tables to extensively analyze data within Sage ERP and help support decisions. Sales data is analyzed by region, product, salesman, period and other dimensions to assist in planning future sales strategy. Purchase and supplier data is analyzed to improve purchasing decisions. Other data is analyzed to highlight operational issues such as delays in sales invoicing. At an operational level, month end closing is much quicker and systematic. “It took us one week to set up a new company,” Dr. Al Hekail said. “Sage ERP flexible forms editor and application programmer interface (API) helps us easily customize screens and reports. Also, strict quality control in managing forms allows us to upgrade quickly. We recently upgraded our software version in a matter of just two weeks. Sage ERP is also integrated in real time to various other systems such as a manufacturing system (Kiwi Plan) that controls production of cardboard boxes. Sales orders from Line 500 are automatically loaded into the manufacturing system for production and data of products manufactured automatically update Line 500.”
Marc van der Ven, Managing Director, Sage Middle East, said: “This is a great example of how Sage ERP supports large organisations such as Al Rajhi, in consolidating their operations. By implementing a single system to integrate the entire business, Al Rajhi’s management and employees have experienced clear and tangible benefits in their day to day activity as well as overall processes. We’ve seen a number of Saudi businesses make the move to adopting a sophisticated IT infrastructure, to meet the new and forthcoming competition challenges of the market. Having just set up our local office in the Kingdom, we look forward to working more closely with our key customers and partners to drive this adoption further.”
About S.A. AlRajhi Holding Co.
Ranked one of the Top 30 companies in Saudi Arabia, S.A. Al Rajhi Group employs about 10000 staff with business interests in Poultry, Agriculture, Industries, Property, Investments, Transportation and Fast Food Retail. It’s group companies include Al Watania Poultry, the largest in the region, Watania Agriculture, Al Watania for Industries, Al Watania Transportation, Al Rajhi Property, Al Rajhi Investment and Dajen Fast Food.
