Infor is celebrating another large organisation in the Middle East using its software. At a ceremony this week, Al-Khaldi Holding Co. celebrated the go-live of several Infor solutions across four businesses in the conglomerate. Al-Khaldi Holding Co. is a transportation and logistics company headquartered in Al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia. It provides distribution services to the steel, petroleum, cement & chemical industries. Customers include Saudi Aramco, Sabic, Satorp, Exel and Halliburton. It is one of the largest companies in the region and operates a large fleet of trucks and vans with the latest technology.
To power further growth, it decided to invest in the Infor CloudSuite Industrial Enterprise solution, hosted in a multi-tenant solution on AWS. It also deployed Infor ION and Infor Birst to further extend the footprint. With the solution in place, it aims to increase visibility and improve efficiency and organisational flexibility as it expands operations within Saudi Arabia to the wider gulf region and beyond.
There is a large market opportunity that Al-Khaldi now hopes to take advantage of with the help of the new solution. Mordor Intelligence believes that the freight and logistics market will be worth US $32.12 billion by 2026, up from US $20.47 billion in 2020 at a CAGR of 6.53%. The growth is fuelled partly by the Saudi Vision 2030 as it looks to diversify from Oil and extend its logistics capabilities.
The project to date
Al-Khaldi has rolled out modules including Financials, Procurement, Sales, Freight, Service and Warehousing across four locations and 195 employees within four businesses. The implementation has taken a rather long three years, but this was no doubt extended due to the pandemic. The solution is available to employees in both Arabic and English. It supports the logistics business with transportation and fleet management, contracting, third-party logistics (3PL), warehouse management, building materials, and trading.
Al-Khaldi also decided to implement the Infor business intelligence tool Infor Birst and leveraged the Infor OS cloud operating. It has helped integrate the software within Al-Khaldi, for example, Ephesoft and Implex. Using Infor ION, part of Infor OS, Al-Khaldi can scan shipping requests and use optical character recognition (OCR) to automate the process of creating shipping requests, waybills and delivery documents. The OCR technology is also used to capture data from invoices and prepopulate fields, saving time spent manually entering the data.
Now complete, the solution has helped deliver consistent processes across the business and the analytics to understand how the business is performing through Birst. Birst also measures productivity and profitability across the business. CloudSuite Industrial is optimising vehicle availability, measuring driver performance and delivering incentives to improve operational efficiency.
Megren Al-Khaldi, CEO of Al-Khaldi Holding Co., commented, “By adopting industry-specific cloud solutions with Infor, we have improved our asset management processes and decision-making and gained greater visibility of our assets, giving us the agility and resources to expand our operations whilst simultaneously improving customer satisfaction.”
The project’s next phase will see Al-Khaldi roll out the solutions to three further business units. There are also other improvements it may consider. For example, it may extend the use of mobile technology.
The go-live ceremony was attended by the CEO, Megren Al-Khaldi and his top management, board members and the team who implemented the solutions. They were joined by Infor executives Kerry Koutsikos, Infor VP and general manager for the Middle East and Africa, and Salem Machaka, vice president of global professional services.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
Despite the project only just over halfway through, the fact that a celebration was held indicates its success. Al-Khaldi has modernised its systems and using the scalability of AWS and the industry expertise of Infor technology and Infor professional services, it has improved order management, transportation management and monitoring and alerting across the organisation.
Kerry Koutsikos, Infor VP and general manager for the Middle East and Africa, commented, “These improvements will undoubtedly yield countless future benefits to Al-Khaldi and its customers as it centralizes and takes control of its business units. We look forward to continuing to support Al-Khaldi on its digital transformation journey.”
Another significant win for Infor in the Middle East and again within a diversified conglomerate shows the Infor solution’s diversity. Other recent wins include Saudi Diesel. It seems that the Infor footprint in Saudi Arabia is growing. Can it increase its market share in the region?
