Alkhorayef Group modernizes its back-office operations with Oracle Cloud

Founded in Saudi Arabia in 1957, Alkhorayef Group made its name producing water pumps and agricultural, irrigation, and well drilling equipment. Due to its success, the group expanded beyond the agricultural sector into fields such as machinery systems, oil, contracting, paper, and printing production. Through its evolution, Alkhorayef Group established a worldwide presence and now operates in more than 40 countries, representing top-quality products and manufacturers.

For years, the group used Oracle E-Business Suite to support back-office operations across its range of business units. Although it served the group well, a lot of IT costs and resources were required to maintain this legacy application, as well as the other third-party systems. On the business side, this older technology also created fragmented processes resulting in inefficient operations and a lack of visibility and insights needed to guide decision-making for the entities within the group.

A lot of manual work was required for procurement, supply chain planning, and budgeting. The inefficiency was only exacerbated by the reliance on spreadsheets and constant back-and-forth communication over email. Collaboration was suffering, and Alkhorayef Group was finding it difficult to standardize data and processes across the enterprise given the vastly differentiated products it produced. Most importantly, the company lacked the modern functionality it desired to bring automation, speed, and innovation into the fold to create a modern foundation for success.

Recognizing the need for a modern platform to support evolving business needs, Alkhorayef began its search. After considering top vendors, such as SAP, the group selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM), and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).

The unified application suite was a clear choice for Alkhorayef due to Oracle Cloud’s world-class performance, security, scalability, and potential for innovation. Moving off its on-premises systems would also save maintenance costs and free up IT resources that the company could redirect to other areas of the business.

Alkhorayef saw the value in the sophistication of the applications, which would bring additional capabilities that were missing in the previous Oracle E-Business Suite environment. Features like AI would eliminate much of the company’s manual work, and the integrated suite of cloud applications would standardize processes across business units to offer greater visibility into performance.

With the help of Oracle Cloud Applications, Alkhorayef Group modernized back-office processes for many of its global business units, saving money and creating efficiency. While the group continues to roll out the tools to additional entities, it has already realized a significant total cost of ownership reduction moving to Oracle Cloud.

With Oracle Cloud ERP, the company gained clearer insight into each entity’s performance, even down to the transaction level. The integration with Oracle Cloud EPM brought faster reporting and financial close, plus streamlined account reconciliation, collections, and invoicing.

Procurement was a primary focus area to keep the business running smoothly. In the previous environment, sourcing, supplier qualification and onboarding, and contracting were all handled manually. By using the automated workflows in Oracle Procurement, Alkhorayef saved employees days of work and reduced its procure-to-pay cycle time. The tool was particularly beneficial for supplier onboarding, allowing teams to qualify and onboard suppliers in less than a day.

Oracle Cloud SCM was crucial in modernizing the group’s supply chain strategy, due to the wide range of differentiated products that it produces. The company’s manufacturing facilities didn’t have a tool to monitor machinery and avoid unplanned maintenance, but now the group uses Oracle Maintenance for predictive maintenance, allowing teams at those facilities to address problems before they arise. This enhanced uptime, improved reliability of the group’s machinery, and helped to reduce overall costs.

Alkhorayef Group also tapped Oracle Supply Chain Planning to balance supply and demand for each product segment, adapting to fluctuations to maximize the efficiency of production lines and increase profitability. In the same vein, Oracle Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) helped the various production networks ensure product quality from sourcing raw materials to manufacturing. The tool provided rapid detection and resolution of quality concerns, minimizing product issues and driving continuous improvement in production.

Oracle Cloud HCM enhanced the group’s HR environment by streamlining core processes such as payroll and benefits enrollment on a central platform with data unified across each entity. Oracle Talent Management gave Alkhorayef a complete picture of its workforce, allowing leadership to provide ongoing support for employees to achieve strategic goals and tie their performance to key business objectives with more insightful KPIs. To help upskill and reskill talent, Oracle Learning provided personalized recommendations based on each employee’s role, interests, and goals so they could develop the necessary skills to be successful in their current role and achieve long-term career aspirations. Similarly, the platform’s succession planning capabilities helped identify top talent to cultivate future business leaders. Oracle Cloud HCM also supported the demands of the diverse global workforce, giving every employee the tools they need to succeed anywhere and from any device.

Lastly, Alkhorayef Group achieved significant improvement in its planning and budgeting processes using Oracle Cloud EPM, which supported connected planning across departments for its workforce, CapEx, OpEx, and projects. The annual budgeting process used to be spreadsheet-intensive and took over three months to complete, but now the budget is prepared and approved in half that time. The platform also provided faster and more accurate forecasting for different timelines—a very difficult task in the previous environment—so that today budgets line up and business units are on track to achieve their goals.