One of Dubai’s largest conglomerates solves challenges related to growing data and documentation management with OpenText solutions for SAP
Al-Futtaim Group leverages OpenText and Avaali to manage data growth and compliance, document management.
Established in the 1930s as a trading business, Al-Futtaim Group today is one of the most diversified and progressive, privately held regional businesses headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Structured into five operating divisions; automotive, financial services, real estate, retail and health; employing more than 42,000 employees across more than 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa, we partner with over 200 of the world’s most admired and innovative brands.
Al-Futtaim Group’s entrepreneurship and relentless customer focus enables the organisation to continue to grow and expand; responding to the changing needs of its customers within the societies in which the Group operates.
Al-Futtaim Group has seen immense business growth over the past number of years and expects to have substantial growth in the upcoming years. Al-Futtaim Group was keen to transform its organization to a complete paperless organization, including their Retail and Auto Sales operations.
Al-Futtaim Group explored options for archiving and document migration solutions of SAP using OpenText for its ECC systems with the goals to keep the production database lean, increase performance and improve business efficiency in order to increase performance, reduce maintenance windows & system administration costs, implement compliant long term data storage mechanisms and also meet industry standards from a statutory and regulatory perspective. Al-Futtaim required a balance between risk and legal compliance by managing data volumes and retention requirements.
Al-Futtaim Group chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of Open Text Archiving and Document Migration for SAP. The implementation team from Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Al-Futtaim Group to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, their requirements, and the roadmap. The workshops also covered all aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Al Futtaim appreciate how they could leverage the Archival Solution proposed to resolve their regulatory and compliance needs apart from finding the scalable archival system for their rapidly growing data. Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document covering the archival plan, then gained the acceptance and confidence of Al-Futtaim Group business and IT team. Avaali team also migrated documents from SAP database to OpenText archive centre. Avaali also took ownership of educating the IT teams about the solution and thus eased change management.
Al-Futtaim Group has implemented Document Migration and Data Archiving for its retail as well as auto sales function.
- Migration of documents of 1.2 TB size from SAP Database to OpenText Archive Centre.
- Single source for all archived documents and seamless access to archived documents from SAP transactions.
- Enablement of users to meet statutory compliance by storing documents in a secure and unalterable form.
- Master data archiving for article master
- Analysing and assisting in closing open items leading to comprehensive data archiving
- In addition to document migration and article master archiving, Al-Futtaim Group undertook archiving additional objects related to finance in their retail and auto functions.
- Reduce database size of approx. 2.5 TB size from the article master archiving implementation.
The OpenText Data Archiving solution allows them to archive all older data into an external archive server and delete corresponding records from the SAP database. Al-Futtaim Group has implemented data archiving for technical object (application logs, info structures etc.) as well as master data object (material/article masters) which had multiple prerequisites and business complete rules.
This has yielded a reduction in database size and improved system performance, reduced backup times and reduced storage costs. The organization is now able to comply with statutory requirement by keeping only 1 year of data in the database.
Industry
Property, Retail, Leisure & Entertainment, Automotive
Customer
Al-Futtaim Group
Partner
Avaali Solutions Pvt. Ltd.
- Increasing Database Size
- High online, tier-1 storage costs and system administration costs
- Declining SAP application performance
- Increase in maintenance windows.
- Requirement of compliant, long term data storage mechanisms.
- Need of meeting industry standards from a statutory and regulatory perspective.
- Scope of improvement in business efficiency
- OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP
- Uphold Statutory Compliance while maintaining SAP DB growth
- Reduction in storage costs using a multi-tier data storage and retention strategy
- Reduction in system administration and costs
- Transaction process improvements
- Store Correspondence type documents and orders
Avaali Solutions is a specialist in enabling organizations to leverage digital technologies to manage their internal business processes as well as engage better with their ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors etc.). Avaali has done over 120+ transformations for large enterprises across Asia, MEA and Europe to help them reduce cost and deliver better business outcomes via digital. The company specializes in Sourcing, Procurement and Shared Service process automation.