With a milk processing capacity of over 1.5 million litres a day and more than 60 thousand cattle head in seven dairy farms, Almarai distributes food and dairy products to large, medium and small stores in six Gulf countries.
The large geographical spread of Almarai’s operations as well as its exponential growth on a sustained basis is supported and aided by the systems backbone provided by Business Systems Department. Consisting of 70 professionals, Business Systems arm of the company provides infrastructure and technical support, manages the company’s functional applications and caters to a pan-organizational information security and quality.
Almarai’s Wide Area Network, based on a combination of VSATs and leased lines, connects 37 locations. “Within Saudi, we use VSATs because communications links are poor in most parts,” says Tanseer Kunjan, Business Systems Manager, Almarai. Most locations have fibre backbone, and Almarai’s network is based on HP ProCurve and Cisco switches. The network also supports IP cameras that are used for activity monitoring.
The dairy company has many technology firsts to its credit. It adopted IP Telephony as early as 2001, when it was unheard of in this region. “We were one the first companies in the Middle East to be certified by BS7799 in 2003,” says Kunjan.
The business critical functions of the company are run on SAP, catering to transactional processing as well as analytical processing. Almarai’s vision includes deploying the latest and the best of SAP’s offerings for its growing and diversifying business functions. “We are in the process of SAP HR module, which includes e-recruitments and portals,” says Kunjan.
Apart from SAP, there are other technologies such as .Net and D2K deployed for specific business needs. Almarai has also automated its sales process by providing handheld terminals to its sales force for route sales, eliminating paper work. All the invoices are printed through these terminals, and data is captured at the point of sales, and fed into a backend system. Besides the SAP system, Almarai have two other homegrown core applications- Sales and Route Accounting System and Dairy Herd Management System.
The company’s corporate data centre, located at the headquarters in Riyadh, houses around 60 Intel based servers, including HP’s C-Class Blade servers and a technical infrastructure ensuring 99 % system availability round the clock along with connectivity to all geographical areas. With a disaster recovery system at a disparate physical location, Almarai’s business information is well protected.
Security is an important consideration for the company and all its hardware and software security has been certified with ISO 27001 certification from BSI. “We also conduct information systems audits against COBIT besides following ITIL guidelines for services,” says Kunjan.
With some major projects underway this year, Kunjan says his hands are full. “We are embarking on a major business continuity initiative. With around 7000 employees, another priority is to improve collaboration within the company,” says Kunjan. Almarai seems to be well geared in technology outlook to meet the challenges posed by rapid business growth. .