Oracle Customer Success — Saudi Vetonit Company

SAVETO Enhances Performance and Collaboration, Increases System Uptime Through Integrated Technology

The complete stack of Oracle software, middleware, and hardware working together has greatly benefitted us, providing an optimized solution for our business needs. We now have the functionality and scalability to expand our operations serving the construction industry.

— Sakher Al Khreisha, IT Advisor, Saudi Vetonit Company Ltd.

Saudi Vetonit Co. Ltd. (SAVETO) is the leading manufacturer of dry-mix finishing materials in the Middle East and North Africa, operating 12 factories in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. The company offers a full range of advanced products under the VETONIT brand, including renders and other types of plaster, flooring products, interior and exterior coatings, bonding agents, and waterproofing materials, in addition to epoxies.

SAVETO was established 35 years ago as a Saudi-European joint venture with a leading manufacturer of dry-mix, building-finishing materials and specialty chemicals in Northern Europe. Now, the company has a distribution network and sales offices throughout Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East and North Africa, offering premium products to suit every need of demanding construction professionals. In addition to its state-of-the-art production facilities and technical laboratories, it operates training centers in four countries, allowing its technical teams to work closely with local contractors.

Challenges

Improve business processes companywide by integrating real-time data across systems used for inventory, sales, and the distribution of dry-mix, building-finishing materials
Gain business agility by enabling business users to adjust enterprise resource planning (ERP) system functionalities without needing to engage internal or external IT staff

Enable faster business growth in the country’s thriving construction-material market by increasing hardware scalability and performance
Increase database stability and availability, so that functional and manufacturing staff can optimally use the ERP system
Simplify hardware administration and reduce time to backup ERP data

Upgraded to Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 to automate, streamline, and enhance functional business processes and gain real-time insight into inventory, sales, and distribution information
Enabled unlimited and rapid scalability, thanks to a virtual, clustered hardware setup administered from a single console using Oracle Solaris, which manages business growth by simply adding a node to the existing cluster to increase performance across the infrastructure

Increased platform availability and scalability significantly with Oracle-on-Oracle integration by deploying Oracle Database with Real Application Clusters, and Oracle WebLogic Server onto Oracle’s SPARC T4-2 servers running Oracle Solaris
Gained business agility by enabling superusers to optimize the ERP system according to frequently changing business requirements—for example to optimize retail sales processes—eliminating the need to submit time-consuming IT requests or obtain approvals for system changes
Improved integration and performance of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 and enabled database and hardware consolidation across multiple internal companies, each with their own production environment, by migrating to Oracle Database from Microsoft SQL Server 2000
Minimized ERP system downtime by using Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle WebLogic Server to ensure high availability with instant failover—whereas previously a single server crash would result in overall system access failure, heavily impacting sales and distribution
Improved collaboration between departments by enabling the integration and visibility of real-time business information, including inventory of construction materials, sales orders from building contractors, and manufacturing output across 12 factories in four countries
Reduced time to backup and restore data from three hours to one hour, so that IT staff no longer work after the business close to ensure the integrity of sales, manufacturing, and distribution data
Enabled department heads to administer security levels for different types of ERP system users or user groups, thanks to enhanced security features of upgraded JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1—with the ability to grant ERP access faster to new, transferred, and promoted employees
Simplified hardware architecture using a SPARC T4-optimized solution for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, so that backups and upgrades no longer need to be performed on separate systems

Why Oracle

“We selected Oracle hardware because it provided us with an optimized solution for our upgraded JD Edwards EnterpriseOne environment—a very compelling business case. Our Oracle-on-Oracle solution is extremely stable. Another advantage is product support, including support for enhancements. Support resources for Oracle products are large and diverse. Its unique products, such as JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, have their own support community, so we always have plenty of available information. Once you experience Oracle modules and products, it’s hard to change because no other vendor offers the same level of integration and workflow optimization,” said Belal Salameh, IT manager, Saudi Vetonit Company Ltd.

We required better performance, availability, and scalability to align with our business growth, and we needed to figure out early in the process whether to switch our ERP vendor. A detailed user survey found that our staff was very happy with Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, so we looked at enhancing the user experience by upgrading to the latest version, and by refreshing our hardware infrastructure to scale reliably.

— Ammar Haddad, executive director, Saudi Vetonit Company Ltd.

About Saudi Vetonit Company

Headquarters

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Employees

More than 2,000

Saudi Vetonit Company

Partners

For the system upgrade and migration project, SAVETO selected Oracle Specialized Partner Global Technology Solutions (GTS). GTS’ consultants took full project ownership, planning with SAVETO and executing the upgrades in addition to providing support.

“GTS provided a unique service because it delivered the commitment, talented staff, and knowledgeable resources that we required. GTS consultants enabled us to take full advantage of the enhanced Oracle software, middleware, and hardware combination,” said Sakher Al Khreisha, IT advisor, Saudi Vetonit Company Ltd.