Balubaid Group of Companies Reduces Help-Desk Complaints by 75%, Improves Business Continuity and System Response
 
 

Balubaid Group of Companies Reduces Help-Desk Complaints by 75%, Improves Business Continuity and System Response

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Balubaid Group of Companies (BGC) traces its roots to an automotive spare parts store opened in 1952 by the company’s founder, Omar A. Balubaid. The company has diversified interests in six industry segments—automotive, food and beverage, real estate, manufacturing, consumer finance, and trading—and is represented in cities across Saudi Arabia. Its businesses include car dealers, car rental agencies, shopping malls, restaurants, finance houses, service equipment, and factories for chemicals, plastics, and batteries. BGC also has business investments in Sudan, Egypt, and Pakistan.

After surviving the massive 2011 floods in Jeddah, BGC chose to deploy Oracle Database 11g Release 2, Enterprise Edition running on Oracle Exadata—the first such implementation in Saudi Arabia—to improve its disaster recovery capabilities. After its deployment, BGC experienced improvements in innovation and business intelligence across each industry segment. In addition, BGC used Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine X2-2 Quarter Rack to enhance its database system’s performance and reliability. For example, Balubaid’s help desk recorded 75% fewer complaints regarding performance issues. The performance improvements contributed to increased sales and better alignment with its distributed business model.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Balubaid Group of Companies

  • “With Oracle Exadata Database Machine, we’ve improved our disaster recovery and business continuity. In addition, we have significantly enhanced our ability for timely responses to our customers.” – Mohsen A. Ba-Abdullah, Senior Director, Corporate Systems, Balubaid Group of Companies

  • Establish a comprehensive disaster recovery and business continuity plan to avoid a repetition of downtime caused by the 2011 floods in Jeddah
  • Improve customer satisfaction by achieving higher system performance during peak workload hours
  • Reduce time spent extracting business intelligence data to improve responsiveness to customers
  • Enhance reusability of existing technology investments by deploying common technology platforms and tools, and repeatable processes
  • Automate change, release, provisioning, and patch management system configurations

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed an Exadata Database Machine X2-2 Quarter Rack with Oracle’s SPARC Enterprise M4000 server to create a high availability architecture with minimum downtime
  • Used the integrated, high-performance infrastructure to reduce employee help desk complaints by 75%
  • Upgraded to Oracle Database 11g to enhance Oracle Exadata’s performance capabilities
  • Consolidated Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g and Oracle Exadata Database Machine on a common platform, which improved front- and back-end performance and provided up-to-date business intelligence data and enhanced business decision-making capabilities for the aggregated company
  • Enabled employees to open work orders 40% faster and obtain responses to inventory queries within three seconds, even during peak hours
  • Simplified system configurations through a consolidated platform, increasing the ability to provide high-quality IT services, based on service-level agreements
  • Acquired and maintained an integrated, reliable, and secure infrastructure to serve a highly aggregated company
  • Enhanced its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) functionalities based on business need—such as delivering product information to salespeople quickly enough to close deals efficiently
  • Developed an IT organization structure in line with BGC's sector‐pillar business model
  • Improved IT processes based on best practices and governance to provide high-quality services to the employees of the aggregated company

Why Oracle

BGC considered servers from several hardware vendors, but selected Oracle Exadata Database Machine for its high performance and scalability.

Implementation Process

An in-house team of technicians from BGC began the installation of Oracle Exadata Database Machine in March 2012 and completed the implementation on time, with minimal configuration changes, in little more than two months. Currently, 300 employees access the system.

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