Al Faisal Holding is one of Qatar’s leading diversified private holding companies. It has an international outlook and operations and has played a significant role in the development of Qatar’s economy. Established in 1964, Al Faisal Holding has since developed in step with the growth and prosperity of Qatar’s economy.
The founder of Al Faisal Holding is HE Sheikh Faisal Bin Qassim Al Thani, one of the region’s known visionary entrepreneurs.
Al Faisal Holding’s diversified business model operates across eight clusters which comprise over 50 companies in property, hospitality, trading, education, culture, leisure, services and manufacturing sectors.
Al Faisal Holding has embarked upon a digital transformation roadmap. One of the key initiatives is modernisation of their ERP back-office for a more modern, digitally enabled, cost-effective IT environment.
A key fact in fast paced conglomerates, especially those that are operating in global and local markets is that business strategy often leads the IT strategy, many times overtaking it, leaving IT operations in a catch-up game
“The business strategy changes a lot of times, especially in conglomerates,” says Kashif Fateh Dad, CIO Al Faisal Holding, who joined the conglomerate in May 2021, “for this very reason.”
After joining Al Faisal Holding, Fateh Dad conducted his due diligence on the overall IT operations across the 50+ business groups and prepared a three-year, forward looking, IT strategy and digital transformation strategy for the conglomerate.
Fateh Dad distinguishes between the two strategies. The IT strategy is meant to be an overview of how you want to run the IT department for the next three years. It is much broader than the digital transformation strategy. This addresses key questions like how IT wants to perform business critical functions and provide improved IT services to its customers.
On the other hand, a digital transformation strategy is meant to address the automation of business processes and the kind of tools to be used. “This is why I differentiate between IT strategy and digital transformation strategy,” says Fateh Dad.
When Fateh Dad joined more than a year ago, the conglomerate had outsourced the entire IT operations to a separate internal company. After evaluation of the pros and cons, an internal corporate IT department was created at the end of last year, managed and steered by Fateh Dad.
Having got approval for his three-year road map for the conglomerate, Fateh Dad now needs to deliver on his key deliverables including the complete digital transformation of the conglomerate as well the ability to incorporate the vision of the leadership family for tomorrow’s business. “How do we digitally transform these businesses and takes them to the next level from a customer service standpoint and from a nation standpoint, is the challenge,” he explains.
“Fateh Dad conducted his due diligence on the overall IT operations across the 50+ business groups and prepared a three-year, forward looking, IT strategy and digital transformation strategy
Opening score for technology and business landscape
The IT operations of the Al Faisal Holding conglomerate and business processes have been built around Oracle E-Business Suite, that was implemented close to twenty years ago. Other than Oracle ERP as its core business application and platform, the conglomerate is also using cloud based, Microsoft Office 365 and other specialised applications inside its travel, healthcare, manufacturing businesses, and human resource functions.
“As part of IT strategy and the digital transformation roadmap we do have business units where we will use isolated ERPs. But the wider plan is to connect these from a financial reporting standpoint into Oracle,” explains Fateh Dad.
A key enhancement of application productivity took place two years ago, when the on-premises E-Business Suite was moved to the cloud and the application services become cloud enabled.
A part of Fateh Dad’s evaluation was to assess the success of close to twenty years of usage of Oracle E-Business Suite across the conglomerate. Fateh Dad did find shortcomings in the continuing usage of manual operations across the conglomerate.
A key reason for this was the disconnect between the speed of business operations and the IT operations. “The setup was outdated because it was done two decades ago. There were no real iterations done to the ERP to catch up with the business processes,” he explains.
Another reason for the lack of automation and reliance on manual processes, picked up by Fateh Dad during his evaluation, was the fragmentation around the Chart of Accounts. Instead of a near-unified Chart of Accounts, Fateh Dad found more than twenty in operational usage.
Having such a large number of Chart of Accounts inside a conglomerate, also limits inter-company reconciliation, since it is almost like dealing with external businesses rather than internal businesses.
On the flip side for Fateh Dad, the long baseline of usage around Oracle E-Business Suite, does give the conglomerate an advantage in upgrading and migrating towards more modern and digitally transformed platforms from Oracle.
“We have a lot of staff that is well versed in Oracle usage. They know how the Oracle application works. They know high level workflows, high level frameworks. We obviously want to be able to utilise that experience when we move forward,” points out Fateh Dad.
“The long baseline of usage around Oracle E-Business Suite, does give the conglomerate an advantage in migrating towards modern platforms from Oracle
Initiatives to leap forward in transformation
Modernisation of the IT department and digital transformation of the conglomerate, as outlined in the strategy documents, are now key deliverables for Fateh Dad. Standardisation and restructuring of multiple Chart of Accounts into a single Chart of Accounts is one of the most important deliverables in the near future.
An immediate benefit from this would be the reduction in manual work and human error, the ability to deliver inter-company reconciliation, and the reduction of continuity risk levels and adherence to continuity risk compliance.
Another critical requirement is to integrate the specialised ERP solutions that have been implemented in select businesses of the conglomerate. “We are going to push and consolidate within a single application platform now,” says Fateh Dad.
These objectives, to connect all the dots into one platform, are now part of the modernisation and upgrade of Oracle E-Business Suite. A strategic partner identified to complete these deliverables for the conglomerate is Oracle Consulting Services.
As part of the initiative to modernise the Oracle E-Business Suite this year, in 2022, Fateh Dad invited quotations from the industry leaders. The objective was to do a points-based technical evaluation and comparison, based on fit for business purpose objectives and five-year public cloud SaaS licensing prices.
Al Faisal Holding had already completed a full-blown RFP exercise in 2017 when it moved Oracle E-Business Suite from on-premises to the cloud using a lift and shift approach. A five-year cloud hosting and software license pricing was in play with Oracle since 2017, that was due for renewal in 2022.
“We did not go for a fresh RFP, but we definitely re-evaluated if Oracle is still fit for purpose for our business. We did a technical evaluation using a points-based system, whereby we compared our business requirements against functionalities available in Oracle,” explains Fateh Dad.
The net result was that Oracle outscored and Oracle Fusion Cloud was selected as the most suitable solution to replace Al Faisal’s existing Oracle E-Business Suite, cloud hosted platform. “It turned out to be a good match for our business needs,” he reflects.
“A strategic partner identified to complete these deliverables for the conglomerate is Oracle Consulting Services
Other than the market focussed, points-based evaluation, there were other factors that also swung in favour of migrating to Oracle Fusion Cloud, according to Fateh Dad.
Al Faisal Holding has already been spending on Oracle licensing and it made more sense to relook at the strategy and see in which areas they could improve to have better application performance. “It makes more sense for us to not reinvent the wheel and just look at our strategy,” says Fateh Dad.
The other aspect was the long baseline of close to twenty years of Oracle application usage. “We wanted to avoid the change management cost because our workforce is used to Oracle. If we look at something else at this stage it will incur a huge change management cost,” he indicates.
Al Faisal Holding has now set its targets on Oracle Fusion Cloud as its future ERP application flagship with Oracle Consulting, partnering to provide services in the area of best practices, process optimisation and selection, implementation, and migration.
“Oracle Fusion Cloud will be the future application of our conglomerate. The whole strategy revolves around moving to the cloud,” says Fateh Dad.
With a good fit between, ability to deliver digital transformation from Oracle platforms, and the high levels of Oracle user competency inside Al Faisal Holding, the future is likely to see a transformed conglomerate inside Qatar.
