Albatha: Spearheading the use of AI features in business process transformation solutions
Modeling processes in minutes with AI capabilities
Respected worldwide for its quality, innovation, and values, Albatha Holdings LLC wished to transform its business processes across its diversified companies in preparation for its cloud ERP migration. The company is using the SAP Signavio portfolio, including SAP Business AI capabilities in SAP Signavio solutions, to model compliant processes in minutes instead of hours.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Dubai, United Arab Emirates | ~8,000 employees |
faster process modeling.
increase in processes modeled per person per day.
fewer errors.
Business Process Manager, Albatha Holdings LLC
Integrating business processes to support a new enterprise process architecture
Albatha Holdings LLC is a widely diversified group comprising more than 25 autonomous companies operating across the Gulf Cooperation Council. These entities specialize in automotive, healthcare, manufacturing, engineering, electronics, fast-moving consumer goods, food, and real estate, among other industries. Founded in the 1950s, Albatha has always been inspired by growth and progress, and it wanted to apply this notion to its business transformation and operational excellence target.
Before transitioning to a new ERP system to meet its goals, the company needed clarity for its different business processes across its organization. This included the areas of procurement, warehousing, production, quality control, plant maintenance, transportation, finance, and sales. Albatha sought to integrate its disparate processes and enable real-time data for its business transactions, inventory visibility, and information for financial reporting.
Albatha ran a pilot project in three of its companies, spending 4.5 months designing more than 300 business processes for various functions. To do this, the company gathered its process owners in two process discovery workshops to ascertain the roles and information needed for activities within a particular process. These process mapping efforts typically involved two-hour sessions and sometimes needed an extra hour to finalize modifications. It therefore took four to five hours to create a validated model for a single process, which proved time-consuming and left little room for scale.
Business Process Manager, Albatha Holdings LLC
Leveraging SAP Business AI capabilities in SAP Signavio solutions to expedite business process modeling
Albatha decided to migrate from SAP ERP Central Component to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition due to the solution’s update functionality, multiple features, and security aspects. In advance of implementing the cloud ERP, the company adopted the SAP Signavio portfolio to map, standardize, optimize, and govern its enterprise-wide processes. Albatha established a center of excellence for business process management that could deliver a unified, transparent view of its business processes to drive efficiency, enhance decision-making, and ultimately enable a successful cloud ERP transformation.
Given the time-intensive nature of the discovery workshops, Albatha evaluated SAP Business AI capabilities embedded in SAP Signavio solutions, choosing the text to process capability in the AI-assisted process modeler to build process models more quickly. With this capability, rather than attend multiple meetings, process owners and subject-matter experts can share information in either short-paragraph or tabular-format templates. This includes details about the roles, activities, IT systems, data objects, and inputs involved in certain processes as well as high-level process descriptions. This content is entered into the AI capability, which creates names of activities and other data in specific nomenclature and produces a comprehensive process model aligned with company standards in under 15 minutes. Following a five-minute validation stage to help ensure that the model accurately reflects the original input, final feedback and sign-off take place in SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub or by e-mail exchange. Albatha engaged SAP experts to help implement the capability.
SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite includes the SAP Signavio Process Modeler solution, which Albatha used to document its business processes for simulation and modeling. And it was able to connect journeys, processes, metrics, systems, functions, and roles with the SAP Signavio Journey Modeler solution. Describing it as the go-to tool for process analytics, Albatha employed the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution to identify where and how it could improve processes. In conjunction with this analysis, the business undertook process mining with the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution. Albatha was an early adopter of lab space for SAP Signavio solutions, a dedicated feature in the suite, where it was able to deploy, test, and validate prototypes. It also used capabilities in the SAP Signavio Process Transformation Manager solution to help oversee and accelerate its process improvement initiatives.
Business Process Manager, Albatha Holdings LLC
Increasing the speed and efficiency of process modeling
Albatha has used the text to process capability in the AI-assisted process modeler to build and model more than 50 compliant enterprise processes in areas such as finance, operations, HR, and manufacturing. With straightforward adoption and use (without training), context interpretation and accuracy, and increased speed and efficiency in creating processes, the capability has delivered big improvements at Albatha.
For example, the modeling time per process has decreased from an average of 4.5 hours to 15 minutes, while reworks and errors have gone from regular to rare instances. One person can spend between 10 and 20 minutes on modeling each process compared to 2 to 3 hours previously, allowing them to build 10 to 12 processes per day as opposed to 2. Replacing the discovery workshops with the text to process capability saves time for process owners. And the business can align processes with its needs in terms of name or activity type (manual, semiautomatic, or fully automatic). Adhering to a standard naming convention for activities, events, and data objects allows Albatha to harmonize processes across its functions and companies going forward.
Overall, deploying SAP Signavio solutions met the company’s requirements for process modeling, creation, insights, and intelligence, as well as collaboration and journey modeling. In particular, using the SAP Signavio Process Governance solution has lowered the cost of workflow administration and helped Albatha meet regulatory requirements, while SAP Signavio Process Intelligence enables it to highlight process inefficiencies and drive operational excellence. This supports Albatha’s future cloud ERP implementation by aligning its processes with best practices, reducing operational complexity, and fostering continuous innovation.
Business Process Manager, Albatha Holdings LLC
Continuing to explore capabilities in business process transformation
Having been impressed by the context sensitivity of the text to process capability, Albatha hopes to explore other AI functionalities in SAP solutions. The company’s other plans focus on supporting a brownfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition with SAP Signavio solutions and integrating its cloud ERP with SAP Signavio Process Intelligence.