>> Announcer: Live from the Javits Center in New York City, it's the theCUBE, covering Inforum 2017. Brought to you by Infor. (bright electronic music) >> We are back with theCUBE's coverage of Inforum 2017. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Barig Siraj and Nasser Bayram. They are both of the Zahid Group, out of Saudi Arabia. Thank you both so much for joining us. >> Good to be here, thank you for having us. >> So I want you to start out by just explaining to our viewers a little bit about what Zahid Group and Zahid Tractor, what you do. >> We are a large group based in Saudi Arabia. We're very diversified. We are mainly in heavy equipment, capital equipment business. We are the importer of Caterpillar machinery and Volvo trucks, Renault trucks, and many other products. More than 40 franchises. We have locations in more than 40 locations, or branches, more than 40 locations for their area, and we have about 4,000 employees, and we mainly focus on providing sales and after-sales services in the kingdom, with a big focus on after-sales. We pride ourselves to be the second to none when it comes down to after-sales services, and we strongly believe in technology and in digital transformation that is sweeping the world of business, and thus far, we embarked on this journey five years ago. >> So what does that digital transformation mean for your business, and generally, and then specifically for IT. Maybe you can start, Nasser. >> Well, first, we have to agree. The business model has changed. There are new business models that has disrupted every single industry landscape out there, and you have to be ready to change and accept that transformation, otherwise, you'll be left behind. The digital transformation takes you beyond managing an organization introducing an IT platform or technology. You have to change the way you think and your readiness to be able to manage where the future is going. If we look, we just attended this session, 52% of Fortune 500 companies in year 2000 no longer exist. They went out of business. In 2015, 55% of Fortune 500 companies lost money. There was no economic crisis or downfall. It simply missed the boat, or they did not, they were not very innovative in their digital strategy or thinking ahead, allowing their industry to be disrupted by people like Uber, Amazon, Alibaba, Souq, an other new entrants with very great innovative ideas and technologies. The old business model of cutting cost or restructuring an organization no longer works. You need to think differently and act differently, and hence, digital transformation becomes critical for your organization, and implementing an ERP platform, standardizing rationalization of your ERP platform, if you have more than one, like in our case, we have more than one, you have to have one standardized platform, one standardized processes, business processes, so that we have one source of data in order to be ready for the future where you can mine that data, have it be by analytics or business intelligence, in order to be able to better serve your customers and learning on about their behavior, about their trends, and how you can better position production services for them in the future to buy, and for you to remain profitable. >> So Barig, okay so now, that's, what Nasser just described, I'm inferring, is much more real-time, much faster, and more data. Your ability to analyze that data wherever it is, how do you, and the processes and people behind that as we talked about technology's the easy part even though some technology's even more complicated than ever. So what does that mean for the IT organization? >> Well for IT organization, we had, and we still have a legacy application built over 30 years. Now, and there we could not reap the benefits of the data mining, the standardization, even that just from AI capabilities on top of that. We cannot reap that until we have that standardized ERP Platform across all our companies. So basically, that's the tall order that was put on our plate, and what we have done, we started the journey. We're partly through it. We went live with two of our companies. We still have three more to go, and we've done it with lesser volume, allowing us to learn and therefore, once we reach our biggest volume company, we would have learned as an organization, not just applying the technology that even the personnel, the change management, the resistant pockets have to deal with all of that. >> Can you give an example of what you've learned along the way, becoming, as we said, it is so much about change management, and it's about getting people over this fear of change. Can you give an example of what you've learned, of what you're doing differently for the companies that have yet to have the rollout? >> The biggest learning experience we had, we just went live with one of our companies, called EJAR, which is a rental company. The success there of the learning, the success is a learning experience. We have a long journey for to go live with five companies, and this is the first one to go live. What we learned by doing that company first is the challenges of change management, how to support on live, challenge of data migration, data cleansing, readiness of the organization, not simply from change management perspective, but also from IT, legal, readiness of your documentation, the contracts, et cetera. It's a vast learning curve to overcome, and we're very happy that we took the strategic decision to go live once more company, so that we gain that experience, and that is the real success we got out of this project now. Now we better we feel we are in better position for the new companies to go forward with, when we go live, we learn so much about change management, where we failed and where we succeeded, we learn better about our readiness, whether it is Zahid Tractor, or Infor, or our IT, our infrastructure, our training program, our after go-live support, the war room was set up to support the go-live, and go in production. We've been two month in production. We're still having some challenges, but nothing that, there are no showstoppers, however, more and more every day, we learn more and more, and we are better positioned to go live with a bing bang on the big company. >> Nasser, as the executive in sort of leading this transformation, do you look for and demand new metrics, new types of KPIs that you want to see? >> Well, definitely, you do the whole thing because of the new metrics. The new metrics have to have built into it, not simply the traditional KPIs of your GPs and revenue and discount and so on, you need to look at customer behavior, customer analytics, pricing positioning, where you are going forward. In the old days, everybody would sit down around the table, say, "Hey, we're number one, okay?" That doesn't hold water anymore. You're number one in what? It's about number one in responding to customer requirements on that customer behavior. Today, with Amazon.com, many retail businesses are challenged, they're going out of business. How do you stop that business model? You can't. So how do you compete? You can. To do that, you have to have the right data in place, the right organization in place, and the right mindset to be able to lead your organization to compete in the new market space. >> Can you give our viewers some examples of the kind of data that you are deriving, in terms of this business analytics, in terms of understanding and deepening your understanding of customer behavior, and what customers want, and how it's changing, how you approach your customers and what you do for them. >> I'll give you a comparison. When we have a legacy systems, what you do at end of day, you extract your data, you transform it and you load it up to your data mart or data warehouse, and then you run your report, and if you're lucky, you have savvy users who can create their own reports on the fly, but with the way we're going with an integrated ERP solution and one standardized platform, we do hope we have the right analytics in place, and business intelligence in place, that we give our management the right data to make decisions, ready to make decisions. Not filtered data, not reports designed, and that takes me straight into your question on IT and ability to IT to deliver. There is no way for any IT organization to cope with the changes. Nowadays, when Amazon went live recently with Whole Food, it took them three to six, three to four months to deal with legal, to deal with retail, with pricing, with the announcement, the whole nine yards of marketing. How did they have their IT ready? That's a challenge. How can you do that in four to six month? That is the challenge in the future. If you don't have the right platform to do that, you will never be able to compete, and data analytics are critical for you to respond or predict the behavior of customer, so before a customer comes next time to the counter, you already have certain statistics that tell you what that person is ready for, and that takes you straight also into IoT. Your products, or our products now, are connected to the Internet. If you don't have IoT in place, connected to your back end, and your analytics, you won't be able to compete, and that would be the differentiator in the future. Those who could do that versus those who will continue to follow the old brick and mortar business model, restructuring and cost-cutting and whatnot. >> So your instrumenting your heavy equipment in the field, presumably, and that's, you're well down the road with that. That changes the data model, it changes the analytics model so I wonder if you could describe that a little bit. I mean, obviously you're processing data at the edge. How much data stays at the edge versus comes back to your central location, maybe you could add some color to that whole equation. >> Well the devices that are put on the machines, there are several ways of putting. The older models, you have, actually the PSSR has to actually go with his laptop, hook it up, suck the data, and bring it back for analytics. The newer models are more, are sending it to, directly to us, and enabling our, what I call tower, to do equipment monitoring, and be able to anticipate, we call up the customer and saying, "By the way." Actually tell the salesmen to call up the customer and saying, "You need to bring your machine in "because it's, you might face a failure "in so amount of time." So improving the customer side, that is, that is that part, but coming back to the organization change issue, we went from a legacy application that the branch managers waited until the end of the month to get the truth, to now being able to, seeing the performance on a daily basis, because they're seeing the truth because everything is connected, whereas before, whatever they did, they don't, their piece of the puzzle, they have a lot missing, and they, information that they waited until it show, send them back there, a report. >> And none of this takes place in the public cloud, is that right? >> No, it does, to add to that, the data is stored in the cloud. Customers have access to it, along with our SOS lab, which is oil sampling lab. They have access to the data to see what is happening, like predictive analysis of their machine performance, and as a result of analyzing the oil, plus any data collected from these machines. We do have cloud implementation. We just went live with our treasury management system. It is on the cloud, and it was our first deployment on the cloud, though the implementation of Infor today is still on-premise. Long-term, down the road, we may be looking at the cloud. >> I got to ask you, we hear Infor messaging about microspecialization, that last mile, all the hard stuff that nobody else wants to do. Is that something that you take advantage of in your industry, or is it? >> I'll give you an example. We utilize the implementation accelerator from Infor for the rental, and it's 77% of our processes map directly into that, so we, that enabled us, that, to have EJAR, which is a rental company, go much smoother. Now, we're working with Infor to enhance their equipment implementation accelerator, and it will be partly the same ratio, around 70% of the processes that we're going to go live with, are the standard processes in the product, out of the box, for the equipment rental, for the equipment business space. >> Our objective is to reduce customization as much as possible, go out of the box, or native, out of the box, as much as possible, but you have to accept the fact, depending on your business environment and some localization requirement, you have to do some customization. However we do have a governance in place, to make sure it's to the minimal. Otherwise, long-term, you'll be challenged with release management and change management and so on, and when you speak of the cloud, if you ever elect to go to the cloud, you can kiss customization goodbye. (Dave laughs) You have to be ready to adopt and adapt. >> And how about your security regime, as a result of the edge and IoT and now, cloud, how is that evolving? >> That's close to my heart. (laughs) >> Yeah, I'll bet, and probably the board's. >> Actually, well, (laughs) actually, interesting enough, many organization, like ourselves included, we invested so much money in building firewalls and security systems to protect what's behind the wall. Now with the cloud, well your most important data is no longer behind the wall. >> Rebecca: It's right there. >> It's outside the wall, so you have to have some kind of a hybrid security system, and you really have to pick the right partner who is hosting your cloud application, leasing your cloud application to you, so the challenge or the perspective of security, cybersecurity, changes drastically and totally, and your understanding of it has to change, otherwise, you just stay behind your own wall and guess what? You can end up locking yourself behind the wall, and you're going to miss the boat, but this does not mean that you'll let down your guard. You have to maintain your security awareness, you have to maintain your security diligence, and you should not underestimate the threats out there, because even if you are on the cloud, the biggest threat nowadays is through phishing. That's what we call the human firewall. Relegating the right awareness, the right education to your organization from within, to understand the threats and the danger of such a threat, otherwise, your password, that's how you access the cloud, you'll end up be compromised and guess what? So will be your data. >> Yes, so, Barig, Nasser, thank you so much for joining us. It's been great to have you on the program. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you. >> Nasser: Thank you for hosting us, thank you. >> See you guys again, great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante, we will have more from Inforum after this. 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