| Desert Dairy at Technologies leading edge |
Almarai, the largest vertically integrated dairy company with its headquarters in Riyadh, the Capital, geographic and commercial centre of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, extends throughout the Arabian Peninsula, leading and influencing the Agricultural, Dairy Processing and Food Distribution Industries. Almarai, a household word synonymous with freshness, quality and service, meaning "green pastures" or "meadow" in Arabic, has a high profile and is one of the leading brand names in the Arabian sub-continent. Growth has been largely organic for this business and accordingly many of the systems in use were developed in house.
The Company commenced operations in Saudi Arabia in 1976. Driven by the desire - "to fulfil the need to translate up-to-date developments in agriculture and food industries into practical activities", Almarai has since grown under the direction of His Highness Prince Sultan Bin Mohammed Bin Saud Al Kabir, who recognized the potential to transform traditional dairy farming of Saudi Arabia to meet the needs of this fast developing country.
Almarai’s activities vary from dairy and arable farming, dairy processing, to the manufacture, sale, marketing and the distribution of a wide range of fresh and long life branded dairy products. To put these activities into the geographic context of the Arabian sub-continent and to appreciate the challenge which is overcome daily by the company, one can imagine the parallel of growing forage in Holland, feeding it to cows in Northern Ireland and placing the milk on the shelves of Supermarkets in Athens. To further complicate matters, ambient temperatures can often exceed 50 degrees.
Professionally managed and market driven, Almarai is administratively divided into three operating Divisions, each with its autonomous conventional management structures, two central support divisions and a central Marketing division.
Business Systems in Almarai is a subset of the Finance central support division. In the past three years the company has seen double digit organic growth and the consequence of this has been the fact that the IT infrastructure has had to keep abreast of the changing demands of the business. Infrastructure was normalised in 2001 to Cisco switched Local Area Networks, Compaq/HP Intel servers and Compaq/HP desktop computers in anticipation of the roll-out of SAP R/3 on Compaq/HP Alpha GS and ES series servers in October 2002 to almost all the divisions and across more than a dozen locations. A WAN infrastructure had to be built using an amazing array of technologies including Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) Satellite technology, leased lines, Avaya's Orinoco Wavelan RF networking and Internet VPNs. One of the biggest challenges say Clinton Jones, Infrastructure and Technical Support Manager for Almarai, was the fact that the first world SAP R/3 solution was to be deployed in locations where one could barely find electricity and telephone lines let alone enterprise class networking. The local TELCO - Saudi Telecom struggled to find circuits to accommodate the connectivity hungry business and accordingly Almarai had to go it alone and build a private Satellite based WAN which eventually they hope to replace with conventional copper or fiber optic connectivity through the local Telco exchange some 30 miles away.
Whilst the new infrastructure and the deployment of SAP to more than 400 users (50% of the user-base in Almarai) represented a real test of the business' will to commit to technology, next on the list was the roll-out in Q1 of 2003 of the Intermec 700 series PocketPC based handheld's for retail van sales of fresh and long-life dairy food products. The initial pilot of around 25 units in the Saudi coastal town of Dammam, home to the petrochemical giant ARAMCO was a resounding success and is now being extended further to include all remaining 30 depots by the end of Q1 2004.
There's hardly a division within the business that has not been touched the rolling benefits emanating from SAP demonstrating improved visibility of inventory, improved profitability reporting and business process effectiveness. The most recent activities have included the first phase deployment of Cisco 7900 series IP phones connected to an AVVID IP Phone infrastructure on the largest and newest of the Almarai Dairy Farms, home to more than 12,000 Dairy Cattle. Almarai is currently building another $200M manufacturing facility on the Almarai Campus near the City of Al Kharj, 135km south of Riyadh, and this will be home to more than 500 employees and more than 200 IP Phones. The important elements to us, are reducing the overall cabling elements and costs in the new building and adjoining sites, having an internally maintainable infrastructure that we can maintain without calling on 3rd party providers and pushing through integration like voice-mail to email messaging says Jones.
Initiatives for 2004 for the business will include extending the functionality of SAP by deploying SAP W/M, improving business intelligence, again through leveraging off information in SAP and the company's Business Objects data mart and building a resilient disaster recovery environment to support all the business' IT infrastructure.
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