Established in 1983, Al Khairat is a privately-owned company and one of the leading suppliers of premium stationery and toys in Saudi Arabia. With a full-fledged sales and logistics network covering most of Saudi territories, Al Khairat is keen to promptly serve its customers with the highest level of quality and efficiency.
Every September, with the beginning of a new school year, the management team at Al-Khairat faces the challenge of efficiently delivering a huge number of stationery products through its distribution network to children and students across the kingdom.
With such a peak seasonal demand, real-time information across the supply chain with up-to-date information on stock, replenishment forecasts and sales is crucial. Al Khairat embarked on a digital transformation journey which Clariba with the objective to develop a state-of-the-art solution, allowing them to react quickly and ensure all students are perfectly equipped for the school year to begin. Thanks to the solution delivered by Clariba, the students - future Saudi engineers, nurses, doctors, lawyers and artists can rely on Al-Khairat to timely equip them with what they need to become the best-in-class from day one.
OBJECTIVES
Deploy an advanced analytics solution capable of providing Al-Khairat with a real-time, interactive view of the 4 key functional areas to maximize supply chain and sales performance:
Sales and Distribution – Insights on sales orders, delivery orders, returns and service levels.
Material Management – Procurement and inventory
HR — headcount, payroll, recruitment, productivity and time management
Finance —insights on billing accuracy and efficiency on receivables
Efficiently combining resources, people and information from these 4 areas, was the the key to accomplish Al Khairat’s mission.
APPROACH
To begin with, Clariba and Al Khairat selected a high-performance team capable of deploying this successful analytics project. The team followed the following 4-phase approach:
WHAT: the project team performed an in-depth evaluation of the business to define the key performance indicators required to monitor each business area and deliver actionable insight to management.
HOW: following the definition stage, the team performed a gap analysis to detect information needs not covered by existing systems and deployed alternative ways to obtain them. Targets for each KPI were added to facilitate performance monitoring.
HANDS-ON: the Clariba experts started the design phase of the user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) offering insightful analytics and management dashboards. Using Clariba’s Visualization Framework, an agile SCRUM-type development methodology and practice, a select team of business users, consultants and IT experts worked together to build visualizations and interactions offering a seamless experience to end users.
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER: finally, Clariba ensured the Al Khairat business team and IT team were ready to ensure enterprise-wide adoption of the solution.
CLARIBA ACT·IN | FRAMEWORK
With Clariba’s experience gained during more than 18 years of successful delivery of SAP-based analytics solutions across different industries, Clariba combines its practices in an end-to-end process methodology and technology framework — the Clariba act·in | framework to deliver customers reliable and state-of-the-art analytics solutions.
By applying the Clariba act·in | framework which unifies development objects, visualizations, good practices, data connectors and a unique user-centred design (UCD), in an agile development process, Al Khairat and Clariba executed the project on time and with the expected outcome defined as objectives of the project.
Agile - SCRUM methodology was chosen to ensure alignment with users’ needs, and small sprints with continuous deliverables ensured the project’s outcomes were continuously tracked and validated.
TECHNOLOGY
The implemented technology stack included as key components:
SAP ERP
SAP BusinessWarehouse
SAP BusinessObjects BI Suite
THE RESULT – TRACKING CORPORATE GOALS
With the analytics solution delivered by Clariba, the detection of issues in any of the 4 functional areas is faster than ever before. Any deviation can be detected immediately and proper actions to fix it are taken timely, increasing overall performance.
The solution has helped create a better organizational alignment with business goals. New processes have been deployed, involving procurement, sales, deliveries, people and financial resources, now working in better harmony towards efficiency. Al Khairat can now react better to seasonal demand peaks while Saudi school children and students receive a better service than ever before.
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