Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 21 | Page 38

COUNTRY FOCUS: SAUDI ARABIA Mission critical: Accelerating vital business processes Saudi Arabia based SAB Holding has deployed SAP® applications (S/4HANA) on the IBM Cloud to accelerate operations and leverage business data for better, faster decision-making. Intelligent CIO talked to Dr Hatem Bakheet, CEO of SAB Innovation, SAB Holding’s technology subsidiary, about the implementation and benefits of the system. I BM Cloud was chosen by SAB Holding, an industrial conglomerate headquartered in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to host its mission-critical SAP® applications. IBM Cloud’s SAP-certified infrastructure will provide SAB Holding with the agility and speed the company needs to keep pace with business demands, while helping accelerate its business processes and fully leveraging its business data for better decision-making. SAB Holding’s construction services subsidiary (RCC) was at a disadvantage for operating finance, payroll and inventory across multiple different systems. Time played a critical role for SAB Holding because the implementation needed to be completed within a tight timeframe for a major project. 38 INTELLIGENTCIO To quickly solve this challenge and enable integrated operations, SAB Holding launched Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) applications from SAP (S/4HANA®) to support finance, supply chain management, HR and payroll, project system and enterprise content management, delivered via the IBM Cloud. Handled and delivered by SAB Holding’s technology subsidiary, ‘SAB Innovation’, the IBM Cloud environment was implemented and ready for use within seven days with zero downtime. With the new solution, SAB Holding benefits from a highly available IBM Cloud infrastructure that’s fully- managed by a team of experts at IBM’s cloud data centre in Germany and backed by IBM’s global network spanning 19 countries and six “SAB Holding’s construction services subsidiary (RCC) was at a disadvantage for operating finance, payroll and inventory across multiple different systems.” www.intelligentcio.com