United Chemicals Company streamlines with Oracle Cloud apps

United Chemicals Company (UCC), part of Saeed Radad Group (SRG), manufactures and markets a wide range of family, personal, household, and industrial care products, from shampoo to water treatment chemicals and pharmaceuticals. Its products are sold throughout Saudi Arabia and in more than 10 other countries. UCC strives to continuously expand its market share amid fierce competition from international players.

The company previously relied on multiple legacy IT systems to manage finance, inventory, and supply chain. Its legacy systems were difficult to maintain and lacked modern functionality, so the company struggled to scale to meet growing business demands. UCC wanted to smooth out processes, to give business teams a single source of truth, and more effectively analyze costs and track orders. Shortcomings in all of those areas contributed to delays in the monthly financial close, so it chose to tackle supply chain challenges first.

With multiple legacy systems, including Microsoft Great Plains ERP, teams were shuttling data among systems using spreadsheets.

Ultimately, the company moved to a cloud native SaaS model and adopted Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, SCM, and HCM to improve its finance, back office,  supply chain, and HR operations. UCC’s parent company, Saeed Radad Group, had committed to Oracle Cloud years earlier, and UCC decided to follow suit.

Among the multiple benefits in adopting Oracle Cloud applications were improved price-performance and total cost of ownership compared with replacing on-premises systems; the potential to leverage emerging technologies; the ability to realize value quickly and standardize business systems during a time of significant company growth; the capacity to outsource security and help prevent security issues; and the ability to adapt to changes in the business landscape more quickly.

Using Oracle technology, UCC increased collaboration with suppliers, gained better insights into the business, and improved the customer experience.

Oracle Cloud Supply Chain Collaboration streamlined the company’s supply chain management processes and helped it better interact with suppliers, vendors, and other manufacturers. UCC’s supply chain team and executives now know which resources are being consumed in real time, which helps the company better plan product delivery dates and has reduced the amount of time staff spends tracking that data. Increased visibility also helps the team track raw materials and finished products from the time an order is dispatched from UCC warehouses until the product is delivered to its customers.

Using Oracle’s order management and inventory management capabilities also reduced order cycle time by half because orders that were previously taken manually are now entered into the system instantly. This has improved customer service, lowered order processing and demand planning costs by as much as 70%, increased order entry accuracy, reduced the number of steps required to process a new order, and improved sustainability because orders are no longer printed. UCC believes better supply chain visibility will eventually help it achieve higher earnings before interest and taxes.

Using Oracle Cloud HCM allowed the company to reduce time to hire by more than 50%. Also, comprehensive dashboards and reports give management instant visibility into HR operations. Payroll processing time not only decreased dramatically but accuracy improved. The time that managers had to devote to requests dropped by almost 90% after UCC streamlined employee self-service applications.

Prior to deploying Oracle Cloud ERP, the finance team spent 70% to 80% of its time “just trying to figure out what’s going on,” which left little time to take action on that knowledge. Following the ERP deployment, those numbers were reversed; the team now spends the majority of its time acting on data insights. And despite the complexity of merging multiple systems into one, UCC was able to bring its new solution online three times faster than an on-premises ERP system, thanks in no small part to Oracle’s built-in best practices and high configurability.

“For me, there was no question that we should move directly to a cloud native SaaS model,” says Firas Alhilu, chief information officer of SRG. “It provides much more visibility on the cost side. With an on-premises solution, there are costs hidden within licensing fees, infrastructure build-outs, and maintenance. With Oracle Fusion Cloud, we can easily budget out for costs for the next three, four, even five years.”

ACSE Solutions worked with United Chemicals Company to implement Oracle Cloud applications.