IOI head of business systems Alvin Lee (right) with SAP Malaysia managing director Hong Kok Cheong.

KUALA LUMPUR: IOI Corporation Bhd (IOI Corp) credits its earlier decision to embark on a digital transformation programme which has resulted in the group realising greater operational efficiencies.

Since its inception in 1982, IOI Corp has undergone several business transformations to become one of the world's leading global integrated and sustainable palm oil plantation players, as well as downstream resource-based manufacturer with strong presence in Asia, Europe and USA, the company said in a statement.

As the businesses grew, and processes became more complex in order to adapt to market dynamics and regulatory requirements, IOI Corp realised the group had to transform and adopt technology innovations to stay ahead.

"Prior to this, most of our operations were handled manually and in silos," said IOI Corp head of business systems Alvin Lee.

"There was no single source of truth and management was unable to make informed decisions quickly, as information was scattered everywhere. We did not have good visibility of the company's performance," he said.

With the strong support of group managing director and chief executive officer Datuk Lee Yeow Chor, IOI Corp embarked on its journey towards digital transformation with SAP, a German multinational software corporation.

IOI Corp had rolled out the SAP S/4HANA solution to its corporate office, mills, refinery and estates, with support from HCL Technologies and Wilmar Consultancy Services as its implementation partners.

The S/4HANA business suite is SAP's 4th-generation ERP (enterprise resource planning) software designed to run on the SAP HANA in-memory database.

With the go-live of S/4HANA, IOI Corp has fully integrated corporate information for real-time decision-making and analytics.

According to Lee, the company's operations are now more streamlined, and processes have been further optimised.

He said the SAP Fiori user interface helped to improve the productivity of employees.

"We use the SAP Cloud Platform to connect satellite applications with S/4HANA to achieve greater business efficiency," Lee said.

"With a strong ERP platform, our group can now continue to assess our businesses in real-time, and ensure both producing and sourcing sustainable palm oil priorities continue to be topmost within our agenda," he added.

"There is no better choice in the market as SAP is the world's leading ERP software provider with strong capabilities in finance, supply chain, and asset management, while having the agility to support plantation industry-specific requirements."

Lee also pointed out that IOI Corp is currently in discussions with SAP to further automate and systematise time-consuming manual activities through robotic processing automation.

He had shared IOI Corp's experiences with digital transformation and operations at the recent SAP Forward Together 2020 virtual event.

Also present at the event was SAP Malaysia managing director Hong Kok Cheong who praised IOI Corp for being one of Malaysia's most transformative organisations.

"SAP is extremely proud that IOI Corp has selected SAP to begin their journey into becoming an intelligent enterprise," said Hong.

"We hope that others will be encouraged and be uplifted by what IOI Corp was able to achieve thanks to its digital transformation success."