Video Interview for Zoho by Jason Bloomberg
At #ZohoDay near Austin, TX. Galal Mokhtar, Group Chief Information Officer, El-Ajou discusses implementing and evaluating Zoho software across a large enterprise, interview with Jason Bloomberg, Managing Director & Analyst, Intellyx. Recorded February 2025. Case study story available at: https://intellyx.com/2025/02/21/enterprise-zoho-deployment-at-el-ajou-group-trading-co/.
Watch the interview video below or visit our YouTube page at: https://youtu.be/yiPAfP2J-Gk
Full transcript of the interview:
Jason: Hi, this is Jason Bloomberg, managing Director of Intellyx. I’m here with Galal Mokhtar, Maar of El-Ajou Holding. So, welcome and why don’t you introduce yourselves and your company. You know, what does your company do and what do you do for them?
Galal: First all, it’s my pleasure meeting you here. Jason I’m following you since long time and I’m, I’m always this is my pleasure to meet you in, in person here.
I’m Galal Mokhtar. I’m a Group CIO for a group of companies in Saudi Arabia called the El-Ajou Group or El-Ajou Holding and subsidiaries. We are almost 10 companies working in multiple industries. The major one is in the health care, then in office automation and computing. And companies in the real estate investment like the normal family business in Saudi Arabia.
They are always having, multi companies and serving in multi industries. The IT department there is a shared service, which is for all companies. The total employees are almost 1100 for the whole group.
Jason: So how big is the company?
Galal: We are speaking about the group of 1.5 billion Saudi Riyal (about $6B USD). So it’s really a substantial enterprise.
Jason: So tell us a bit about the problem you faced on the IT side.
Galal: To be frankly speaking, if I’m speaking about my journey with Zoho, it is a little bit before going to El-Ajou. I was actually working for Signify Saudi Arabia, which was previously Philips Lighting Saudi Arabia.
You know, Philips Lighting has changed the name to Signify, and maybe this was more than 10 years ago. And at the time we were moving from a legacy ERP system to a new ERP system. And you know that the ERP implementations are always taking longer time to achieve, and the business cannot wait. So I started to think we should have some sort of a local platform at the time to temporarily serve the business requirements so that we can build something fast.
And it would also be working as a change management for the employees in the company to work in a different way. At the time, I went through a long journey of checking different platforms until I reached selecting Zoho as a platform. And at the time, we used Zoho Creator, we used Zoho Analytics.
Jason: So this was at your previous company or was it at El-Ajou?
Galal: Yeah, and when I moved to El-Ajou, the first thing I did, I acquired Zoho because I know now what’s the value-add of, of this one. And actually, given the number of applications I used from Zoho suite, it’s quite good. I use Zoho Creator, Zoho Analytics, Zoho Flow, Zoho WorkDrive, Zoho Project, a lot.
In addition to a lot of other tools from ManageEngine as well, because ManageEngine, you know, is a sister company for Zoho.
Jason: So what was the core problem at El-Ajou that led you to bring in Zoho right off the bat.
Galal: When I moved to El-Ajou, I know the value-add of having a tool like a low code platform in serving filling the gaps of the processes.
We have a lot of gaps in processes, and we started to think about how to build something fast and easy for the employees to use. So we acquired Zoho because I know it before. So it didn’t take long time to take the decision. And we started to build the different modules that will fill the gaps of the processes and the workflows for our organization.
Some of them were built for a temporary use. Some of them were built for continuous use. And the strange thing is that whenever we started to move from the legacy ERP system to the new ERP systems, I found that the employees started to be resisting the change a little bit, because they liked Zoho as an easier environment than any other ERP system.
Jason: So I picked up three different core use cases there. There was temporary ones filling the gaps and processes, and more permanent ones filling the gaps and processes. And then there was sort of a modernization moving from older to newer.
So, tell us how that balanced out. It’s interesting that you mentioned temporary because usually if you go through all that trouble, you’re going to build something that’s more permanent.
Galal: But yeah, sometimes you have the vision of introducing the ERP system, which is a huge thing that will take time.
And you know that this will be covered in the future. But the business cannot wait. For the implementation, which might take one year to be implemented. So that’s why having a tool like Zoho platform allows you to do something like this. So, for example, I will give you a use case that we were having a problem with the old HR system in that it doesn’t cover the business trips.
Okay? And the business trips in our organization were having very specific needs. And very customized requirements. So in almost less than a week, we built a complete workflow for the business trips, where the employees submit for the request and get it through the workflow approvals, calculating the amount of money that needs to be calculated for the employee, and sending it to finance to process it.
The whole workflow was done in almost one week. So something like this is helping the organization very fast, but whenever I was building it, this would be covered by the HCM module in the ERP system that we are selecting to implement. So we did this temporarily till then, and we used it for more than one year.
More than one year is enough return on investment for a week, from my perspective.
Jason: Okay. So that’s an example where it’s temporary in the interim until the ERP system is live. But there were also needs for more permanent capabilities that you would integrate with? Yeah, even even
Galal: Yeah, even after implementing the ERP, some of the interfaces of the ERP might be a little bit complicated. So we start to implement interfaces from Zoho to bulk load data into the ERP to make it easier for the people and faster integrations.
One of the solutions that we also implemented in our current company, El-Ajou Medical, actually is an office reservation module and the meeting room reservation module with a graphical AutoCAD interface. And it is a little bit complicated, but actually using the Zoho platform it makes it easier to put tablets in front of each meeting room, showing the status of the meeting room, the coming meeting, previous meeting, and with input capability from the tablet itself.
To reserve from the Zoho Outlook integration with Outlook 365, all the options are available, including integration with access management system. No one is allowed to log into the space of the meeting room unless they are already registered as a member in the meeting room. You know, the tool is really flexible and as much as you know how to use it, it is giving you all the capabilities and to close your eyes and imagine.
Jason: So part of the story is a front end story. You built better interfaces for people to use and capabilities for users. But then part of it is more of the back end story, the integration story, which I find interesting because people may not be as familiar with Zoho’s integration story but used Zoho Flow for the integration.
So tell us more about the integration part of part of the challenge.
Galal: Actually, I’m using it intensively in integration up to the level that I used it recently in the onboarding and offboarding process of the employee integration between our ERP system or HCM system and our active directory. For example, whenever an employee is onboarded, we are extracting the data of the employee and automatically creating the account in active directory and whenever is the, the, the employee is onboarding reach it to the last working day.
We are automatically deactivating the account. And this was one of the audit requirements, for example. Okay. And we automated the process using Zoho Creator.. Zoho Flow, I use it in many things, for example, integration with Office 365 to get the calendar of the meeting rooms so that it will appear on the devices of Zoho creator I used for the whole flow for this one.
I’m also actually testing the capabilities of the Zoho DataPrep, which I believe is the next level of the integration in comparison to Zoho Flow which might be a little bit having its own limitations, but Zoho DataPrep that from my knowledge with Zoho, whenever they are introducing a tool like this one, It has started out a little bit with limitations, but the vision is clear, and I believe that in the coming couple of years, it will be amazing in integration platforms.
Jason: Very good. So we’re almost out of time. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about?
Galal: Actually, one of the important things whenever someone is searching for a local platform, what are the aspects that we need to look at and build on what to select a platform over another platform? This is something that I really need to transfer because 10 years back, whenever I was trying to select, I went through a process of more than six months to test five or six different tools.
And I am a practical person, so I have to do it myself. Register a trial and try to do something by my hand so that I can get the feeling of how easy, how hard is it? So whenever we are speaking about a low-code platform, the easiness of the tool is very important.
Do you need external support to use it, or will you use it with your team directly without the need to use to have a, a third party implementation? Does it allow you to create your own native mobile app, or do you have to use the mobile app of the application itself?
Okay, and something related to the privacy and security, this is also very important to take into consideration. And some other aspects that might be a little bit special for our case, which we were looking for something which is allowing Arabic interface right to left.
Jason: Oh, that’s right. Arabic.
Galal: Yeah. Right to left text. Right to left and Arabic data with capabilities to search inside the Arabic data.
This was also very important for us so that we make sure that the bilingual capability is available. These are the aspects that I take into consideration. And just for you to know, the whole of the Zoho tools that I used, I never used an external partner to implement.
Jason: Very good.
Galal: It is with the team. And support from Zoho onboarding sessions from Zoho themselves, one or two sessions, in addition to my team, and we are doing the implementation.
Jason: That’s very impressive. So did you end up building your own mobile apps with it?
Galal: Yeah. We built maybe two or three mobile apps. Without any knowledge about mobile app development. It is just building with the tool, in the web interface, with all the capabilities, and then push a button to generate the mobile app.
Jason: There you go.
Can’t get a better story than that. Yeah, yeah. So I think we’re out of time. Thank you very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you.
Galal: My pleasure. Thank you.
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