Leading Malaysian conglomerate leverages on-demand applications to drive standardization, best practices and business process transformation.
Sunway Group, one of Malaysia’s property-construction powerhouses with a 13,000-strong employee base, is moving to the cloud to drive procurement business-process transformation. And it is using solutions from Ariba, an SAP Company to do it.
Consistent with its continuous mission to espouse innovation in delivering high-value products and services and transform the way it sources goods and services, Sunway has turned to Ariba for solutions that will enable it to drive standardization and best practices across its procurement operations.
“In today’s challenging economy, it is not enough to just identify opportunities for savings. To be successful, we must ensure that they actually reach the bottom line,” said Dato' KL Tan, Senior Managing Director of Property & Construction Divisions, Sunway Group. “Ariba offers us the scalability to expand and consolidate, improve transparency and create a metric-driven approach to sourcing that can deliver exponential savings and sustainable competitive advantage.”
Sunway’s association with Ariba began in 2000 when the company implemented Ariba’s on-premise solution for managing purchase requests and purchase orders to standardize procurement on an enterprise-wide basis. In 2009, the company embarked on its cloud journey with Ariba® Sourcing™ and Ariba Spend Analysis™ to increase its visibility and drive spend compliance across more than 100 business units.
Since putting the solutions in place, Sunway has conducted over 1,000 sourcing events that have generated savings of more than RM82 million or USD $25 million. The company has also improved compliance and reduced its sourcing cycle times.
Today, Sunway announced that it is expanding its portfolio and moving to the cloud to enhance and accelerate the results it has achieved including putting additional Ariba solutions in place, such as Ariba Contract Management™, Ariba Supplier Management ™ and Ariba Procure-to-Order™.
“By delivering their solutions in the cloud, Ariba makes it very easy for us to accomplish our goals,” said Dato' KL Tan, adding that, “All of the tools we need to effectively manage our sourcing process can be easily accessed and shared across functions, divisions and geographies.”
Mr Cheah Kok Hoong, Group CEO / Director of Hitachi Sunway Information Systems, agrees. “Because they are delivered through a single interface platform in the cloud, Ariba’s solutions will allow us to quickly and easily consolidate all of our procurement information across functions and divisions with less time, cost and effort,” As the extended IT arm of Sunway group, Hitachi Sunway will apply its skills and expertise to ensure that Ariba’s solutions are properly implemented and optimized, and deliver the capabilities required to effectively achieve the company’s goals.
“The economic downturn has taken its toll on the global market for commercial real estate, and created challenges for companies like Sunway,” said Shareen Gongular, Director, Ariba SE Asia. “By embracing the cloud and implementing Ariba’s solutions, Sunway can enable new processes that allow it to anticipate and quickly respond to changes in market conditions and customer demands and maintain its competitive edge.”
