Photo caption (from left): Omar Bukhari, Head of Consumer Retail Services, SAP Saudi Arabia, with Saad Saud Alhowaimel, NADEC, Vice President - Digital & Technology

Riyadh, KSA — 21 August 2024 — The National Agricultural Development Company (NADEC) has successfully implemented SAP Signavio, leveraging the technology to advance the company's digital transformation strategy. The initiative is aligned with the Kingdom's Vision 2030, and aims to enhance the efficiency of NADEC's services, supporting diversification of its products and enabling it to enter new sectors in the food industry. It will also support expansion into local, regional, and global markets while improving customer satisfaction and product quality.

Supported by the SAP Customer Success program, NADEC achieved the deployment within just five days, and customers, staff and partners are already benefitting from the results. In total, 51 business processes have been transformed, including finance, procurement, warehousing, production, quality control, sales, transportation, and plant maintenance.

Saad Saud Alhowaimel, NADEC, Vice President - Digital & Technology, said, 'Achieving operational excellence is fundamental to NADEC's goal of supporting a diversified economy and contributing to regional and global food security strategies. Through the SAP Signavio business transformation project, we have integrated and streamlined our business processes, automated tasks and gained greater visibility, insight and control over our diverse operations. This empowers our employees deliver exceptional service for our customers and partners across KSA, GCC, and the wider Middle East region.'      

The NADEC SAP Signavio project was so successful that it outperformed competitors across global industries to win the category of 'Best Achievement in a Business Process Management Program' at this year's prestigious Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Awards held in the U.S.

The goal of the transformation project was to create a single source of information to evaluate where NADEC could best integrate its business processes to acquire real-time system data on business transactions and inventory visibility across different verticals. Implemented solutions include SAP Signavio Process Insights, SAP Signavio Process Manager, and SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub, all of which were integrated with SAP S/4HANA, an enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution. The integration resulted in a precise and comprehensive roadmap for business process improvements and strategies.

A total of 116 recommendations were implemented across the 51 business processes analyzed. These led to significant results including a 37% reduction in average transactional time and near-perfect accuracy across product costing. 

Omar Bukhari, Head of Consumer Retail Services, SAP Saudi Arabia, commented, 'SAP Signavio is an end-to-end business process transformation platform that enables enterprises to quickly understand, benchmark, improve, transform and manage their business processes rapidly and at scale. This makes it an ideal solution to support NADEC's focus on operational excellence and growth. The NADEC team's forward-thinking approach and readiness to collaborate inspired our Customer Success department, and the resulting solution will enable the continued agility and high performance needed to propel NADEC's expansion and long-term success.'

Eman Goubran, Head of Sales EMEA South, SAP Signavio, commented, 'SAP SIgnavio was selected for the project for multiple reasons including the ease of integrating the system with existing SAP solutions; the effortless creation of models, simulations and flow charts; the fact that the Signavio Process Collaboration Hub enables NADEC employees to share knowledge seamlessly; and the specialized expertise and support provided by the SAP Customer Success program. The SAP Signavio project is part of a wider digital transformation and modernization strategy to support NADEC's expansion into new and varied markets.

Last year, NADEC launched an ambitious strategy as part of its plans for transformation in the coming years, aiming to achieve a significant shift in the food industry and actively contribute to the policy of self-sufficiency and food security in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, based on three key criteria: sustainability, growth, and health.

NADEC's strategy primarily focuses on developing food projects based on quality and sustainability, achieving operational excellence, localizing modern food industry technologies and methods, and training and developing national talents and skills, with the goal of contributing to self-sufficiency in line with Vision 2030 for food security.