Bahrain Maritime and Mercantile International (BMMI) have selected Oracle as its technology partner. The US$540K deal will see Oracle providing BMMI with its E-Business Suite Solution. This will help strengthen BMMI’s position as a regional and global player in the FMCG and third party logistics (3PL) arena, by enabling Supply Chain Management planning and execution end-to-end, from interaction with suppliers to delivery to clients.
The solutions will offer BMMI full visibility, management and reporting capability on the performance of each Supply Chain movement, thereby reducing cost related to waste and inefficiencies, increase profitability, and explore more revenue and market share growth opportunities.
Headquartered in the Kingdom of Bahrain, and with international operations spanning three continents, BMMI is a major sales and marketing, logistics and supply chain group. Listed on the Bahrain Stock Exchange, BMMI is one of the fasting growing companies in its sector, with an annual turnover approaching US$200 million and employs around 600 staff comprising people of 24 different nationalities.
Oracle’s E-Business Suite 2003 Professional User includes Warehouse Management, Mobile Supply Chain Application, Self Service Human Resources, Learning Management, Inventory Optimisation, Advanced Supply Chain Planning, Financials, Payroll, and Demand Planning, among other applications. On the technology side, Oracle provided database migration from standard edition to enterprise edition, database enterprise licenses, application server enterprise edition, express server, and ERP/CRM developers and test user IDs.
“As our business grows, our focus is on an enterprise application with a strong reliable database, and an application server to provide performance for our regional and global presence in countries like Djibouti, Qatar, and Kuwait,” said Mike Kruger, CIO, BMMI. “Oracle showed a good understanding of our business requirements, and demonstrated the solutions relevance in all business aspects. “Not only did Oracle provide us with a state-of-the-art ERP platform, it also consolidated seven Oracle database instances and integrated many legacy systems.”
Kruger added: “We opted for Oracle because of its complete ERP solutions with powerful focus on Supply Chain Management needs, the strength of it’s future roadmap, database and middleware, Business Intelligence and reporting. Oracle’s E-Business Suite 2003 Professional User is critical to our growth and will provide added value to our group. This is in the form of improved internal processes, increased efficiency and productivity together with reduced cost while resulting in more efficient communication and greater responsiveness to our customers.”
BMMI were looking to benefit from a fully integrated enterprise application for financials and reporting, complete Supply Chain Management (SCM) with a focus on automated warehousing activities and third party logistics (3PL), demand planning and forecasting, with a complete focus on human capital management applications including HRMS, Payroll and learning management. The company also wanted to integrate POS activities for their retail activities.”
An important focus for BMMI was Oracle’s Supply Chain Management modules, which would help BMMI to better manage their supply chain activities. Oracles SCM modules allow BMMI’s suppliers access to relevant systems, such as viewing invoices and shipment status. Suppliers can also participate in the forecasting process, managing warehouse information using Warehouse Management System, supply chain planning and integration with handhelds.
BMMI were seeking a stronger ERP and logistics solution, and their demands were vast. The company has extensive warehouse operation all over the Gulf while its 3PL units deal with a very large number of food and beverage transactions.
“BMMI had been operating on supply chain and logistics systems that were installed when the business was much smaller. They therefore needed a warehouse management system that would enhance growth and performance,” said Arun Khehar, vice president, retail, private and manufacturing, Oracle MEA. “A good warehouse management system was crucial to the company’s future growth and performance. That is where Oracle’s WMS came into play.”
Khehar added: “We took BMMI on a visit to one of our existing users of WMS to demonstrate how the system could benefit BMMI. The visit also served to show how WMS coupled with Mobile Supple Chain, Advanced Pricing, and Collaborative Planning could give the company a further competitive edge.”
Implementation of Oracle’s solution is underway, and is being undertaken by Satyam Computers.
