Enterprise Zoho Deployment at El-Ajou Group Trading Co.

BrainBlog for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg

Based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, EI-Ajou Group Trading Co. is a diversified enterprise with offerings in workspace management, digital systems, retail and banking solutions, and several other divisions.

Historically, El-Ajou struggled with several legacy ERP systems and various tools, leading to inefficiencies in business processes across the organization.

Galal Mokhtar, Group Chief Information Officer at El-Ajou quickly realized that a low-code solution would help the company address scalability, rapid development, and integration challenges.

He chose Zoho as his platform of choice to resolve legacy ERP integration challenges while also empowering his team to build new applications.

Making the Decision

Mokhtar had used Zoho applications at his previous employer Signify (formerly Philips Lighting). At Signify, he led the effort to migrate from a legacy ERP system to a new one.

Such migrations can take many months, so he decided to implement a temporary local platform to meet business requirements during the transition.

This need for a quick, temporary solution led him to Zoho. His team leveraged several Zoho Apps, including Creator, Analytics, Flow, WorkDrive, and Projects, as well as several ManageEngine tools.

At El-Ajou, Mokhtar found he faced many of the same challenges that his team faced at Signify, so he knew Zoho was up to the challenge.

Both Temporary and Permanent

As with Signify, El-Ajou required temporary applications during the transition period as they implemented a new ERP system. The low-code Zoho Creator tool was critical for enabling the El-Ajou team to temporarily fill gaps in existing workflows and other application needs.

“ERP implementations are always taking a longer time to achieve and the business cannot wait,” Mokhtar explained. “So I started to think to have some sort of a local platform at the time to serve temporarily the business requirements so that we can build something fast.”

Filling in temporary gaps had an important side benefit as well, as it helped the organization modernize their ERP-based applications on a more permanent basis, especially when El-Ajou used the Zoho tools to build new user interfaces to provide required application functionality.

The El-Ajou story thus combines front-end innovation primarily with Zoho Creator as well as back-end modernization with applications like the Zoho Flow integration tool.

Examples of Problems Solved

The El-Ajou team leveraged Zoho tools to build several bespoke applications, including the following:

• A business trips module for their legacy HR system – El-Ajou had specialized requirements for booking and managing business trips. In less than a week, the team was able to build a complete workflow application that enabled employees to submit requests for travel, obtain the necessary approvals, and handle the accounting for each trip. The app then sent the request to the finance department for processing.
• An office and meeting room reservation module – The El-Ajou team integrated the Zoho Creator-based front-end with the company’s Microsoft 365 back-end to support a room reservation application that featured a graphical AutoCAD-based interface. “We used Zoho flow for the integration with Microsoft 365 to get the calendar of the meeting rooms so that it will appear on the devices of Zoho creator,” Mokhtar said.
• Automating employee onboarding and offboarding processes – The El-Ajou team leveraged Zoho to integrate between the existing ERP system, its HR management system, and Microsoft Active Directory to support both onboarding and offboarding employees. The resulting application automatically extracted the necessary employee data to create the user’s account in Active Directory.
• Various mobile apps – the El-Ajou team also used Zoho Creator to build several mobile apps without requiring any knowledge of mobile app development. Creator essentially provided the team with ‘one click’ generation of mobile apps.

One final note: El-Ajou was able to leverage Zoho tools to build all these applications with Arabic language support. “Right to left and Arabic data with capabilities to search inside the Arabic data. This was also very important for us,” Mokhtar explained.

The Intellyx Take

The fact that El-Ajou was able to leverage Zoho apps for both temporary applications and integrations as well as permanent ones underscores both the power and flexibility of the platform.

Other low-code tooling may be suitable for building lightweight, temporary applications that wouldn’t hold up long term. On the other end of the market are enterprise low-code platforms that are suitable for building permanent enterprise applications but have too steep a learning curve to be suitable for quick, temporary apps.

Zoho, in contrast, is strong at both ends of this spectrum. Customers like El-Ajou end up being the winners, as it achieved faster deployment of business applications – both temporary and long-term – as well as a seamless ERP transition that was able to handle large-scale financial data efficiently.

With all the employee-facing benefits that El-Ajou was able to deliver by leveraging the Zoho platform, perhaps its greatest win was behind the scenes: a 60% reduction in its manual data migration workload.

The greatest obstacle to migrating from one ERP system to another, after all, is data migration. Each ERP system organizes, structures, and formats data differently. Moving from old to new, therefore, requires careful and sophisticated data migration – a capability that the Zoho platform delivers.

A final benefit that El-Ajou achieved is a benefit that all Zoho customers enjoy: the fact that all Zoho apps work seamlessly with each other.

One of El-Ajou’s challenges was its fragmented application landscape, which led to diminished productivity and increased errors. Simply by running Zoho apps, El-Ajou was able to eliminate this fragmentation – icing on the cake for its core application and integration achievements.

Copyright © Intellyx BV. Zoho is an Intellyx customer, and Microsoft is a former Intellyx customer. Intellyx retains final editorial control of this article. No AI was used to write this article.