Al Nab’a Services LLC (ANS)

It is the largest integrated facility management organization in the Sultanate of Oman. Established over 25 years ago it has a 6000 strong workforce and several firsts to its credit including – the first company to be certified ISO-9001:2008 in the facility management industry in Oman and the first company to have an in-house Medical Centre, Fleet Maintenance and Training Centre. At any given point in time ANS has over 1200 active sites where its staff are deployed in functions ranging from Housekeeping, Security, Pest Control, Waste Management etc. These sites are located all over the Sultanate of Oman and are across industries as diverse as Government Installations, High-Traffic Retail Showrooms and Hyper-Markets, Factories, Offices, Airports and other Industrial Installations. ANS has over 800 active customers including some of the prestigious brands in Oman and the GCC area. With such a diverse portfolio of clients and sites.

ANS’ key challenge is one of variability.

• Variability in Costing – In order to bid for prospective accounts, ANS’ marketing team had to manually prepare bids and quotations that were each unique to the customer and the specific project. 

• Variability in Customer Engagement Terms – i.e. in Contract Terms and Conditions including staff deployment schedules, billing rates, credit periods.

• Variability in Staff Payments and Work Schedules – owing to the diversity in the functions of the workforce and their work schedules, the payments made to the staff through the regular payroll had a high degree of variation. In dealing with this necessity to be flexible across business processes ANS’ employees were literally drowning in the variability of each quote, contract terms, employee payment policies. High Cycle Times and Human Errors were common. Delayed invoices and collection led to high working capital requirements and delayed payroll meant employee dissatisfaction. In addition variability had crept into business processes such as Procurement, Material Management and Inventory Control where increased flexibility meant loss of control leading to higher consumption and lost profits.

At a Glance

Company: Manpower Service Contractor specializing, in Housekeeping, Security, Landscaping and Waste Management.

Industry: Facilities Management

Geography: Sultanate of Oman/GCC

Key Challenges: 

1. High degree of variability inherent in the business.
2. High Cycle Times for various processes.
3. Human Error in managing variability.

JobNext Benefits

1. Flexible Architecture – allowing variability to be managed.

2. Cycle Times reduced by a factor of 80% .
3. Human Errors eliminated.

ANS had created a home-grown application that allowed them to manage their business, however this application did not have the ability to support the increasing complexity and diversity of their business model. Furthermore this system was a client-server application and allowing secure remote access to this system had additional IT Infrastructure related challenges.

The Solution

JobNext Business Management Platform was chosen as the application to support and automate ANS. Utilizing a highly flexible Project-based architecture JobNext is able to manage and support the variability built into the ANS’ business. Key features include: 

The Result

“SoftNext is not a vendor – but our family member” – Sayyid Khalid bin Hamed bin Saif Al Busaidi Founder and Chairman of the Al Nab’a Group of companies.

Reduction in Cycle Times and Human Errors across all business processes: 

• Payroll for 6000 employees processed with 0 errors in 7 days as opposed to 21 days earlier.
• Contracts and Quotations prepared by one person across 600 customers and 1200 contracts as opposed to 5-person department.
• Complete elimination of human intervention and manual decision making in Payroll policies, procurement and billing.
• Invoices created for all customers in 7 days – a reduction of 75% – leading to faster collection and reduced working capital requirements.
• Proactive Maintenance of fleet and equipment with no delays.

The Chairman, Board of Directors and Senior Management now have a fine-grained control and view of the business across verticals, customers and contracts. Leading to better decision-making and paving the path for hyper-growth in the days to come.

The implementation of JobNext at Al Nab’a has done more than improve the efficiency