USG Middle East shifts to Oracle Cloud

USG Middle East (USGME) is a joint venture between USG Corp–USA (USG), Boral–Australia (BLD.AX), and Juman Industrial Investment Company in Saudi Arabia.

Since its founding in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, in 1985, USGME has been a leading manufacturer of ceiling, interior finishing, and drywall partitions. The company’s products are supplied to more than 45 countries through four regional manufacturing plants via a wide network of sales, technical offices, and distributors.

Some of USGME’s operations and business workflows were completed semi-manually. To support global growth goals, the company wanted to take advantage of automation and innovation in the cloud.

For example, it needed a paperless and more seamless cloud ERP and HCM system, driven by a strong database and emerging technology. USGME sought a cloud solution that would connect its global operations to help standardize processes and bolster its modernization goals.

Using Oracle Cloud, USGME integrated and enhanced its finance, supply chain, and human resources processes across its global operations. The company efficiently runs its major processes with strengthened controls and automated approval workflows.

Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP improved visibility and accuracy of costing. Intercompany transactions are now easier, saving the company a significant amount of time previously spent on data entry. Today the company consolidates all of its ledgers and benefits from increased synergy across major lines of businesses globally—putting timely, accurate information into the hands of decision-makers with an automated close. Ultimately, the finance department shortened the monthly close process.

Meanwhile, USGME has also decreased the average order cycle time to about 5 minutes. The average procure-to-pay cycle used to take up to one week, due to manual approvals. Now enabled by the automation provided through Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, the company's procure-to-pay average cycle time has been sliced to a single day—increasing reliability and collaboration with suppliers, partners, and customers.

In addition to improving efficiencies within finance and supply chain processes, USGME saw significant improvements in HR. Using Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, the company can easily plan, manage, and optimize its global people processes with one common data source. HR service requests raised by employees used to take 24 hours to receive a response. With Oracle Cloud HCM, the process has been cut to an hour. Employees can quickly get answers and resolve a variety of issues ranging from compensation, sick leave, and more. Furthermore, Oracle Payroll enables the payroll department to process and generate employee payments faster, from four days to just one.

USGME’s success with Oracle Cloud ERP, SCM, and HCM has prompted the company’s expansion into a complete Oracle Cloud Applications suite adoption. The company has a roadmap in place to implement Oracle Advertising and Customer Experience across its other business units, as well as its parent company, Modern Arab Contracting and Trading Co. This will allow the company to operate on a single unified platform to make better business decisions using a single source of truth.

USG Middle East worked with Evosys for the implementation.

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