From its headquarters in Dammam, a vibrant port city in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province, Juman focuses on investing and operating joint ventures and wholly owned subsidiaries in building materials. Founded in 2005, but with a history that extends over 35 years, Juman and its subsidiaries operate around 150 thousand square meters of manufacturing land; offices that cover the Middle East, Africa, and southern Europe; and partnerships with the most recognized building material multinationals.
The Juman Group of Companies, through subsidiaries, have worked on projects as diverse as SeaWorld in Abu Dhabi, the John Hopkins Aramco hospital in Dhahran, and the Coca-Cola arena in Dubai.
Transforming business operations
In 2020, Juman chose to optimize their business processes by deploying Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP across the whole group of companies and joint ventures. Their project delivery roadmap started with three of Juman’s businesses:
- Gerflor Middle East: since 1976, Gerflor Group has been known for their high-quality and durable flooring solutions, specializing in manufacturing vinyl flooring systems, including rolls, tiles, and Rigid Luxury Vinyl Tile.
- USG ME: founded in 1902 as United States Gypsum Company, USG are a leading manufacturer of ceiling, drywall partitions, and finishes.
- Bostik (an Arkema Company): Juman supplies Bostik’s construction and consumer range, including sealing and bonding products, wall and floor preparation material, tile adhesives and grouts, waterproofing products, façade, and panel adhesives.
Yehia Al Sheikh is Group IT Manager at Juman. He’s overall lead on the Oracle project, which was a challenge initially. He explained, “We went live during the COVID pandemic. It was a very difficult time as everyone was working remotely. As a result, it took us a while to make the Fusion Applications our main point of entry for ERP, because during the transition we were working in parallel with our legacy system.”
Exploiting business data
Executives were expecting analytics and insights on their Oracle Fusion Cloud Application data, so almost immediately after Fusion Cloud ERP was live they started asking how they could exploit the data being captured. Al Sheikh and his team started by delivering Excel reports for senior executives, manually combining data from multiple sources. Then the Oracle Analytics product team introduced Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence (FDI), a family of prebuilt, cloud native analytics applications for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications providing the business with ready-to-use insights to help improve decision-making. Al Sheikh recognized the value and participated in the Oracle Sprint program, which showcases FDI capabilities using customer data. During the Sprint, experts from Oracle and VAAMG, a specialist Oracle Analytics partner, implemented FDI out of the box and also added some custom dashboards.
An accurate source of information
When Juman executives saw the outcome of the Sprint, they saw how FDI could extend the value of their Fusion data. Working with VAAMG, Al Sheikh and his team began transitioning from the custom Excel reports to pre-built FDI content, starting with Sales Management reports. Al Sheikh explained, “The advantage of FDI is that the pre-built reports don’t need maintenance. You can free your mind, knowing that they are 100% validated and correct, even as the Fusion Applications themselves are enhanced. It’s a big advantage for us. If we find an anomaly in the FDI reports, we know it’s likely to be a business process issue and we’re able to go and identify the root cause in the ERP.”
Analyzing profit
Profitability analysis was a major requirement. Management needed detailed analysis of profit and costs across multiple dimensions – for example, breaking costs down into raw materials versus company resources, to see how variances in each affect profitability. They also needed to evaluate cost of sales and customer service data so they could analyze sales team performance. In addition, some customers qualified for discounts and rebates, which also affected profitability. Al Sheikh said that “With FDI, it’s easy because most of the detailed Fusion data is curated for us, allowing us to build custom visualization to slice and dice as needed. Management can view total sales per territory, per person, per product, per category, before EBITDA, after EBITDA, and compare it with the cost. And they can do it whenever they want. It’s live, on demand, self-service. It’s changing completely the way they work.”
Some of Juman’s sales costs are not in Fusion, so Al Sheikh’s team built a template that enables the finance team to add it, blending it with Fusion data in FDI.
Replacing Excel
Before FDI, when Juman analyzed data in Excel, it consumed a lot of resources and time, so reports were only delivered monthly and were always 10 days out-of-date, sometimes longer if the experts who created the reports were unavailable. Now management can see the data daily, quickly highlighting any issue with costs and raising visibility to any product or territory that’s underperforming, so they can tackle issues immediately rather than waiting until month end. Another issue with Excel was that the data was not secure, and analysts were prone to ‘fix’ the data in the spreadsheet rather than tackle data quality or process issues at source. Data in FDI is in a reliable, secure system of record.
Additionally, because FDI inherits its security from Fusion, data and analysis can be safely shared much more widely with decision makers. Before only top executives received Excel reports, but now FDI analysis and reports are shared with all sales teams because the data is correctly limited to their specific territories. As a result, decision makers throughout the business are much better informed.
A cultural shift in decision making
Moving from Excel to FDI is a cultural shift for business users. It’s a very different way of working; helping them take full advantage of the new visibility requires significant attention from Al Shiekh and his team. “We involve users from day one and engage them throughout the project. We explained the objectives we expect to achieve. And when the system went live, we did training and multiple follow-ups, encouraging them to use it by showing them the benefits. We had the advantage of excellent executive support. When we celebrated our first ‘go-live’, the chairman of Juman was clear ‘you asked for this, we invested and now we have it. It’s your turn, start using it and realize the benefit.’”
Al Sheikh thinks this cultural shift can go further. “If you are only working with static numbers in a PowerPoint presentation for example, without the ability to interact or go into more details, it’s hard to get the insight needed to make great decisions. But during that meeting, if you can review what’s happening on the live system in an FDI dashboard, it will be very easy to drill into the data or look at the data in different dimensions to get better insight. It’s going to be a game changer, I think.”
Being mobile
Outside of meetings, managers rely on having information to make decisions on the fly. Al Sheikh explains, “With FDI, managers can take dashboards with them on their mobile devices. That’s extremely useful, especially for the sales teams. They are connected all the time. With FDI, they don’t need to open their laptop to see the see the dashboards. They can easily access the information on their mobiles – both the pre-built content and the custom dashboards we have built for them.”
Partnership
Al Shiekh values the relationship with Oracle and also with their partner. “VAAMG are experts and very professional with FDI. They helped us enable and activate the system quickly. Initially, as well as implementing the FDI platform, they worked with us to develop a custom sales dashboard, which was complex. Now we are working together on another set of dashboards for sales budgeting and sales order tracking. They are one of the best partners I have worked with in terms of responsiveness and understanding our needs. Any problems are immediately rectified, and they are available always for us.
Working with VAAMG is also helping me develop the skills we need to move forward within my team, and that’s an important objective for me.”
Looking to the future
Al Sheikh noted, “We’re on a journey with analytics and FDI, I see so much potential. One area is to make use of AI that Oracle is building into all its products – for example, automated narratives and interactive video to help interpret data and get better insight faster.
We also want to use FDI across our whole business. We started with sales because that’s the most critical area: if we do not perform in sales, everything else will collapse. But we need better insight into supply chain, inventory, procurement, manufacturing, planning and budgeting, warehouse management and maintenance. As we deploy more Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, we expect FDI to be right there, delivering the insight in every business domain.”
Learn more about Juman and FDI, and you can always ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community or learn more from the Oracle Help Center.