Majid Al Futtaim has joined forces with Microsoft to transform its financial planning and hone its analysis capabilities.
By leveraging Microsoft Azure Data Platform as part of this collaboration, Majid Al Futtaim seeks to automate and streamline its financial and operational reporting and design a new centralised information hub, eliminating the need for human intervention.
The move comes after the retail conglomerate experienced the challenge of data silos. It took the company too long to receive reports, as extracting the data and later modifying it through Excel was time-consuming.
“Our aim was to have the finance function reinvent itself and create a holistic information ecosystem that serves all our processes and people,” said Rahul Bhandari, chief financial officer at Majid Al Futtaim Retail.
“We were able to accelerate the digitisation of our performance data management, and the results speak for themselves. Our automated reporting and analysis are now available on the go and allow faster access to actionable intelligence.
“We have been able to unify our KPIs and consolidate data financial, commercial, operational and industrial data points to give us holistic views of our business.”
As a result of generating a unified view of the company, Majid Al Futtaim says it’s saved an estimated 6,530 hours of labour.
By expediting and facilitating its financial operations, the retail giant hopes to inch closer to the digital revamping of its ecosystem.
Executive director of enterprise solutions at Microsoft UAE, Tariq Halawani, said: “The modernisation of Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s finance data platform will serve as a reference point for every finance team that still struggles with siloed data systems and manual reporting.
“Through the power of the Azure Data Platform, hosted in our UAE data centres, Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to build a solution with customised and controlled access to all types of data, thereby democratising data access across the organisation.”
