Olive is essential for strategic digital transformation. If you’re managing digital transformation, or looking to change vendors, you need Olive. Olive is a much-needed tool for evaluating and implementing enterprise technology solutions. It’s a unicorn!
Zamil Group is a family-owned investment holding company with a diverse portfolio of businesses including Building Materials, Manufacturing, Offshore, Petrochemicals, Trade and Services, Real Estate, and Investment.
Zamil was established in 1920 and has a 100 year proven record of building business. The Group’s motto, “Strength Through Diversity,” illustrates its sustainable approach. This, along with the Zamil Group’s pragmatic strategies, core values, and expert team, has contributed to their success and longevity. Based in Saudi Arabia, Zamil Group has remained prosperous throughout the country’s economic and industrial era, notably becoming the first family company to be listed on Saudi Arabia’s stock exchange.
Zamil group has over 40 affiliate companies, either wholly-owned or joint venture partnerships, as the majority shareholder.
A complete strategic digital transformation of the entire Zamil Group with integration across solutions at a broad level for companies within Zamil, as well as integrations within the individual companies.
Nouf AlZamil heads up digital transformation for Zamil Group. Her vision is to accelerate strategic digital transformation for the Group and affiliate companies in 2020 and beyond.
Previously each company within Zamil Group had a variety of custom-built technology solutions that operate in Oracle, SAP, etc. These solutions have been built up over time. This method had cost the company a huge sum and didn’t work appropriately. The user adoption rate for one solution, in particular, was less than 30%. To add salt to the wound, the team became aware of an off the shelf solution that could have met 80% of their needs, and been used appropriately, for considerably less costs. Having been through the process, Nouf’s team identified that they were missing out on efficiency by using these custom solutions. They were much too costly to run and did not yield the intended results. Additionally, many solutions used had basic functionality and reporting capabilities, and some were becoming obsolete and needed to be replaced.
Rather than continue to build and rebuild something from scratch for every solution required, the team favored finding existing options that meet each project’s majority requirements. Zamil’s strategy was to find best-match solutions that meet 60%-70% of the business needs. The remaining 40% to 30% can be optimized down the road when the second phase of digital transformation has been implemented. Therefore, finding solution vendors that listened to client feedback to optimize their product was important.
Zamil Group needed the digitization process to both modernize the solutions inside each subsidiary, and make them more cloud-based and connected, giving head office broader visibility into each company, while enabling all the subsidiaries to flow data up to head office. By choosing Olive for this multi year digital transformation venture, Zamil Group has already increased the flow of information between the organization and accelerated reporting to optimize decision making, ultimately innovating and future-proofing the organization.
Undergoing digital transformation affects business activities, processes, competencies, and models. When done successfully it can yield valuable results for business growth. The volume of solutions Zamil Group required, along with the overlap of projects and integrated solutions were daunting, but Olive’s features met these needs and more.
Olive’s collaborative platform saves hours of wasted time in meetings, spreadsheets, and email threads. Olive instantly disqualifies vendors that don’t meet the project’s custom requirements. This saves much time and ultimately money in the process. Looking forward, the value of finding the best match solution is incalculable. The current solutions used were extremely costly due to the level of customization the product needed to meet the Group’s needs. With a <30% user adoption rate, this was extremely wasteful.
Due to the level of integration required between solutions, it was imperative to gather requirements from necessary stakeholders and make changes to the project as new requirements emerged. With Olive, multiple projects with overlapping stakeholders can be run simultaneously. Olive can facilitate a high volume of collaboration on multiple projects with agility.
With no specific timeline in mind for implementation, due diligence was a priority to ensure the best fit solution is chosen. To meet the needs of the individual projects and integrate with other solutions seamlessly, all work done in Olive is recorded and time-stamped, and extensive due diligence reporting is built into the product.
Since choosing Olive to facilitate the entire digital transformation, Zamil has moved through the undertaking with unprecedented speed and agility, while ensuring all potential solutions are carefully analyzed against business needs.
Zamil Group is currently about halfway through this digital transformation. There are many more solutions to be found and evaluated; however, Olive’s collaborative platform is giving the team new confidence while moving through the digital transformation, aiming to complete all phases in 2021. With Olive, they are confident they will be able to achieve this.
To date, solutions found with Olive have enabled better connection within Zamil Group companies, and also better relationships within the companies themselves. With these digital solutions, Zamil has moved processes from paper trails and emails to seamless automated applications, saving time and money, moving the company into 2021 and beyond.
