Microsoft today announced that Majid Al Futtaim Retail – operator of the Carrefour retail brand across 16 countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia – has transformed its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) capabilities through the power of the trusted, intelligent, versatile Microsoft Azure Data Platform. Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s finance team leveraged Azure Analytics Platform to fully automate financial and operational reporting and create a single source of truth for decision-makers.
Majid Al Futtaim Retail faced the significant challenge of data silos. Waiting periods for reports were long, as data had to be manually extracted and modified using Excel. Reporting needs of the organisation were subsequently skewed depending upon which function had requested information.
Through Azure Synapse and PowerBI, Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to fully automate its financial and operational reporting, eliminating human intervention. The transition enabled faster, deeper insights for stakeholders. While creating a unified view of the business for all division leaders, Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s automation of Excel reporting has saved a calculated annual minimum of 6,530 labour-hours. The company now intends to incorporate Microsoft Azure Machine Learning into its technology mix, to drive AI use cases within its finance function.
By increasing efficiencies in finance, Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to significantly accelerate its digital transformation journey. Additionally, the organisation’s new information ecosystem allows its commercial team to gain insights in seconds, through a few clicks, from more than 35 million records of daily data.
“Our aim was to have the finance function reinvent itself and create a holistic information ecosystem that serves all our processes and people”, said Rahul Bhandari, Chief Financial Officer at Majid Al Futtaim Retail. “We were able to accelerate the digitisation of our performance data management, and the results speak for itself. Our automated reporting and analysis are now available on the go and allow faster access to actionable intelligence. We have been able to unify our KPIs and consolidate data financial, commercial, operational and industrial data points to give us holistic views of our business”.
“The modernisation of Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s finance data platform will serve as a reference point for every finance team that still struggles with siloed data systems and manual reporting”, said Tariq Halawani, Executive Director, Enterprise Solutions at Microsoft UAE. Through the power of the Azure Data Platform, hosted in our UAE data centres, Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to build a solution with customised and controlled access to all types of data, thereby democratising data access across the organisation”.
