SUCCESS STORY
Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group LLC(ESAG)

Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group achieves
customer loyalty goals, legal caseand supplier invoice managementwith OpenTextIndustry• ConglomerateSolutions• OpenText™ Extended ECM for
SAP Solutions• OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management
for SAP Solutions®

®

Results

The group gains operational efficiency and compliance and improves
customer retention with OpenText solutions for SAP

Achieved 35 to 40 percent
time savings for processing
supplier invoices
Established a single, group-widecontent management solution,
seamlessly integrated with SAP®

Improved provision of customer
service and retention withease of access to customer
order related documents
Eliminated manual
handling errors for supplierinvoice processing“OpenText is helping us to meet ourobjectives of improved business partner
relationships and better information
management with greater efficiency.”
Debasis Panda

Group Head, Information Technology
Easa Saleh Al Gurg GroupEasa Saleh Al Gurg Group achieves customer loyalty goals, legal case and supplier invoice management with OpenText

Easa Saleh Al Gurg Group (ESAG) is a 100 percent family owned,multidivisional conglomerate founded in 1960 by H.E. Easa Saleh
Al Gurg, KCVO, CBE. Headquarterd in Dubai, ESAG’s 27 companies
have a diverse range of products and business interests, including
retail and lifestyle, consumer, building and construction, industrial
and real estate. The group has more than 3,000 employees, six
joint ventures, including Al Gurg Unilever, Siemens LLC and Akzo
Nobel Decorative Paints LLC, and is partner to more than 370
brands, such as Osram, Dunlop, Armitage Shanks, Zanussi, Smegand 3M. The group has an active presence throughout the United
Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman and Saudi Arabia, and business
operations in Asia, the Middle East, Africa and parts of America,
Australia and New Zealand.
Customer retention is a major KPI for ESAG. With approximately
20,000 active customers in highly competitive markets, ESAG
places major importance on its relationships with business partners.
Customers are continually looking for alternative suppliers, based not
only on competitive pricing, but also on service differentiation. Witha heavy reliance on manual processes and paper documents, thisposed a major challenge for ESAG.
Without a unified, enterprise-wide Content Services approach, eachline of business created its own silos, losing the important benefits ofbusiness insight and automation.
“There was a lack of transparency in documentation, which
affected our customer service standards across all business units,”
said Debasis Panda, group head, Information Technology at Easa
Saleh Al Gurg Group. “Finding the right document at the right time
was always a challenge.”

Either documents were difficult to trace or were endlessly
duplicated, making it hard to determine if a document was current.
Across the group, around 80 percent of all company data is related
to SAP . ESAG conducted a comprehensive evaluation to identify
the solution best suited to its needs. With seamless integration
to SAP ERP Central Component (ECC), the group’s core ERP
platform, OpenText was chosen. The OpenText solutions for SAP
deliver standardized, advanced Content Services to SAP businessapplications, removing the effort and cost of integration, while
also eliminating the risk generated by an integration project andversion compatibility. Choosing OpenText™ Extended ECM for SAP
Solutions and OpenText™ Vendor Invoice Management for SAP
Solutions was the natural conclusion for ESAG.
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“With around 2,500 suppliers and more than 82,000 invoices
received annually and growing, the workload to manuallyprocess and enter these into SAP meant staff often had towork on weekends during the end of the month to complete
any backlog. With OpenText Vendor Invoice Management for
SAP Solutions, around 60 percent of all invoices are processed
automatically without losing any existing controls. The solution
helps us reduce turnaround times for processing a supplierinvoice, with the handling of all exceptions via workflow,
enabling us to resolve them quickly,” said Debasis Panda.
With high levels of manual data entry, errors were inevitable andkey information could also be missed. The OpenText solutions havegreatly improved accuracy, released staff from the repetitive natureof data entry to perform other value-added tasks and has sped up
overall processing times.

“Having fully implemented
OpenText Vendor Invoice
Management for SAP
Solutions and measured
the results, we areachieving time savingsof between 35 and 40
percent while handling
supplier invoices.”
Debasis Panda

Group Head, Information Technology
Easa Saleh Al Gurg GroupEasa Saleh Al Gurg Group achieves customer loyalty goals, legal case and supplier invoice management with OpenText

ESAG opted to implement Extended ECM for SAP Solutions groupwide in a single roll-out. By involving key stakeholders from theoutset, not only does the solution meet expectations and needs, there
is also senior management buy-in, resulting in high user adoption.
For the Vendor Invoice Management for SAP Solutions
implementation, ESAG selected five entities as pilot projects,
with the remainder following quickly.
“Once the pilot implementation of OpenText Vendor Invoice
Management for SAP Solutions was complete, other entities in
the group could clearly see the advantages and there was quick
acceptance. We were under a lot of pressure to implement in otherareas, too. Having fully implemented OpenText Vendor Invoice
Management for SAP Solutions and measuring the results, weare achieving time savings of between 35 and 40 percent whilehandling supplier invoices,” noted Debasis Panda.
The OpenText solution also aids ESAG with audit and compliance,
including a comprehensive audit trail that is automatically captured
at every stage of the process.
“In the past, it used to take lot of time to provide relevant
documents, and at times we couldn’t locate some. Now, we caninstantly find all documents related to any transaction done in SAP.
This is extremely helpful for dispute and resolution cases, where
we need to retrieve previous documents, such as purchase orders
received from customers, and acknowledge delivery notes alongwith all customer related documents,” stated Debasis Panda.

With content now consistently organized in a single, group-wide
structure, OpenText automatically links workspaces to create greatersynergy between business units. Users can simply drag and drop
items into the relevant folder and make them immediately available forcollaboration across the enterprise.
Every day, around 250 users benefit from the time savings, efficiency
improvements and easier approvals, as well as the speed and ease of
locating documents to better handle supplier and customer queries,
all thanks to OpenText. Extended ECM for SAP Solutions is also usedas the organization’s legal case management system, handling cases
throughout the entire lifecycle. All principal agreements and contracts
are now managed in a consistent structure with generated automatic
notifications of agreement expirations.
ESAG recognizes that “improvement is a journey.” Future plans include
exploring the OpenText solution for employee file management,
project management documentation, complete end-to-end purchaseto-pay processing, engineering document management and a supplierself-service portal. Already underway is the implementation of “SalesOrder Processing” in SAP by scanning purchase orders received
from customers.
Debasis Panda concluded, “OpenText is helping us to meet ourobjectives of improved business partner relationships and better
information management with greater efficiency. The close
relationship with OpenText helps us to bring the value add to thebusiness at the right time.”

About OpenText
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through market leading information
management solutions, on-premises orin the cloud. For more information aboutOpenText (NASDAQ: OTEX, TSX: OTEX)
visit opentext.com.
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