19of Covid

Solutions for better wor kflow

Faisal Jassim Trading Company has successfully implemented several initiatives including a BI portal for effective decision making

Faisal Jassim Trading Company, Known as FJ Group, , established in 1988, specializes in engineering, manufacturing and trading of products and systems, in the electrical and mechanical fields related to construction industry. With over 1000 qualified employees, the company has earned its reputation in the market. With base in UAE, the company has expanded its reach into Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Qatar , Oman and India.

Arun Kumar Mohta is the Group IT Head at Faisal Jassim group and has been recognized as the ‘Best Employee’ in 2020. He shares insights about the digital transformation of the company that ranges from a BI portal to implementation of document management software.

In-house solution portal The major focus of digital transformation initiatives at the company has been on its in-house Business Intelligence portal, which captures data that enables decision making insights for the Management.

“We have an in-house business intelligence named FJ Portal. We have designed it with our own web developers. The data from ERP is fetched into this portal for the convenience of management to analyze. The data is added every night. It is similar to live data as it is only a few hours old but not exactly as live data makes the portal slow down with multiple users,” says Mohta. With this new portal, the workflow in the company was digitized and the productivity of the employees increased. This was especially so in the cases of sales team who had to rigor

Arun Kumar Group IT Head, Faisal Jassim

ously follow up about their product delivery and Receivables and also Target vs Actual Billing and Booking. “Since we have implemented the workflow, it has been helpful in the backend process. The flow of invoices goes from Enquiry to quotation- Quotation to invoice- Invoice to delivery and delivery to payment. With this, the salesperson can initiate the workflow,” he added. He further said that the workflow also defines the time that should be taken for every node. If the time exceeds, it will be alerted. The portal is also optimized for mobile use for the convenience of the salespersons. Sales team also came into benefit with the implementation of digital signature as part of its digital transformation. “The digital signature which is password protected ensures easier process for the sales team. The sales team can submit the signed documents to the contractors as private or public links with time validity unlike previously when the documents were attached to the email,” says Mohta.

ERP and Data Analysis While most companies have some ERP deployed, the differentiator can be the optimum use of data for the convenient analysis by the management. The FJ Group has an ERP implemented

and operational for the past 10 years. However, while there was input of data, it wasn’t being converted into a meaningful form or output to be of any assistance to the management in making Business decisions. An optimum method for data analysis was absent and the implementation of DMS (document management software) from Vicisoft addressed this challenge, ensuring and eliminating data dependency. The company has been using the software ‘Vicisoft’ for the past 1.25 years, is content with it as it is optimized and customized according to the needs of the firm.

“We are a B2B building solutions provider. It is therefore important to understand the business just as much as technology when working in a company like this. This ensures us to give valuable solutions to the management, as per our President Raphael Khlat, IT should be Business enabler and to make the information easily available in meaningful way.” Knowing the importance of sales and accounts in any company, Mohta focused not just on the convenience of the sales team but also on entire departments.

Focus on entirety The FJ Portal is a unique portal designed specifically for the needs of the company. This has ensured that the entire team ( Sales / marketing / Corporate / HR ) could work together digitally. For the convenience of the sales team, the portal gives access to the account’s documents.

“It (FJ Portal) ensured that the sales team themselves could see their progress in sales. Previously the sales team had to approach the accounts department to collect data like that of receivable agents / PDC Status / Cheque Bounce status / LC . With this portal, they could analyse all the data including customer wise receivable agents, PDCs, LoCs etc. The newly Introduced Model Sales Order Budget Approval enables the Division Managers to approve sales order after analyzing the costs and margins, through their mobile. Only after the approval will the ready in ERP for delivery,”

This portal also aids other departments like the Human Resource Department. Through this portal, the employees can add their own leave request into it. It can further be approved by the DM from the portal and will be inserted into ERP automatically. Employees could also have a look into more details from this portal like the leave balance. HR can also access all the required details from portal especially the dates of expiry of passports, visas etc of the employees.

“The portal is entirely in-house as the management do not wish their data to be going out of the company. This is the main reason the company is not yet into cloud storage. The entire data is in the in house datacenter. We also have our in-house DR site in Abu Dhabi,” added Mohta. With datacenters helping you achieve high availability through active clustering and automatic hot failover within data center,

the company is still not ready to let go of its traditional roots in technology.

Going Eco-friendly But with its digital transformation, Faisal Jassim is trying to eco-friendly and trying to reduce its carbon footprint. By trying to go fully digital, the company’s first step is trying to go paperless. “Since the company does B2B business, every Submittal would be of 500 to 600 pages. Until now the company used to take bind up the Submittals and that too of multiple copies to send out to the contractors. After implementing DMS we have tried to minimize it. It is not yet at 100% as some contractors prefer the hard copies. Still the number of papers used has been reduced drastically,” said Mohta.

With time saving, better access and stronger security, going paperless saves cost in the long run. “With these latest technological implementations, we have gone green and there is a reduction in the number of papers used by the company. There is also a reduction in the carbon footprints. These technologies has helped in saving the environment and also the company in terms of long term cost cutting,” concluded Mohta.