Majid Al Futtaim Retail forms a strategic partnership with Microsoft

Microsoft announced that Majid Al Futtaim Retail, the operator of the Carrefour retail brand in 16 countries across the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, has transformed its financial planning and analysis (FP&A) capabilities by leveraging the power of the Microsoft Azure Data Platform. The finance team at Majid Al Futtaim Retail used the Azure Analytics Platform to fully automate financial and operational reporting and create a single source of truth for decision-makers.

“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.”

Data silos posed a significant challenge for Majid Al Futtaim Retail. Reports were delayed because data had to be manually extracted and modified in Excel. The organization’s reporting requirements were subsequently skewed depending on which function had requested information.

Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to fully automate its financial and operational reporting using Azure Synapse and PowerBI, eliminating the need for human intervention. The transition allowed stakeholders to gain faster and deeper insights. Majid Al Futtaim Retail’s automation of Excel reporting has saved a calculated annual minimum of 6,530 labor-hours while creating a unified view of the business for all division leaders. The company now plans to integrate Microsoft Azure Machine Learning into its technology stack in order to drive AI use cases within its finance function.

Majid Al Futtaim Retail was able to significantly accelerate its digital transformation journey by increasing efficiencies in finance. Furthermore, the organization’s new information ecosystem enables its commercial team to gain insights from more than 35 million records of daily data in seconds, with just a few clicks.