Al Babtain Group enhances security, analytics, and productivity with Microsoft Azure

Standing tall as Kuwait's colossal family-owned conglomerate, the Group embarked on a journey to transform its technology infrastructure and revitalize its growth.

To lead this transformation Manoj Ramachandran Edayath joined Al Babtain Group as Group Chief Information Officer nearly two years ago, bringing over two decades of IT experience across various enterprises. “Taking on the Group’s new strategy, I realized I couldn't just leap from a legacy platform to digital transformation. I had to first focus on digitalization and then move to transformation," Edayath recalls.

Edayath decided to start by instilling a digital culture across the organization, encouraging staff to embrace cybersecurity best practices, self-service analytics, and automation. To achieve this, Edayath chose to partner with Microsoft and integrate various technologies into a cohesive system. "Microsoft's rapid innovation offers comprehensive solutions from a single source, allowing us to seamlessly integrate diverse technologies into an end-to-end product. This consolidated approach empowers us to continuously build upon our transformation journey," he explains.

Strengthening cybersecurity

The first pillar of Al Babtain’s transformation was cybersecurity. "I started by focusing on prescriptive, prioritized, and simplified set of best practices that we could use to strengthen our cybersecurity posture," he noted.
The Group continued by implementing Microsoft 365 E5, including components like Microsoft Intune for device management, conditional access policies, and endpoint security. “We facilitated seamless single sign-on (SSO) across all applications while bolstering security through Microsoft Entra ID’s (formerly Azure Active Directory) multi-factor authentication (MFA),” explains Edayath. “We have also migrated all our workloads, including monolithic applications, to Microsoft Azure cloud, which enabled us to secure our infrastructure. In just six months, we improved our Microsoft Secure Score to around 80.”

Empowering business through analytics

The next shift was towards data-driven decision-making. "Before, we lacked a business analytics culture," Edayath notes.” But once we began using Power BI, integrated various data sources and launched around 40 reports, our business management team started heavily making use of analytics.” These reports detail information from capacity planning and management to delivery profits, sales per category, brand, and salesman up to marketing expense tracking and customer profiling. With these rich insights, the company is empowered to take a calculated approach in all its operational domains.

The Group also uses Power BI for historical data analysis, comparing current sales figures with those from previous years. This approach provides valuable insights that guide future business strategies. Power BI also offers a comprehensive view of human resources, further enhancing Al Babtain Group’s organizational efficiency.

Streamlining operations with automation

After improving its security posture and putting its data to work, Al Babtain Group looked to optimize its operations. "We implemented Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations across various divisions and took advantage of the Microsoft Power Platform to streamline our workflows," Edayath notes.

In its food and beverage operations, Al Babtain Group uses the platform to oversee inventory, recipe management, and purchases. "The restaurant sales occur in our enterprise resource planning software, and all the financial data resides in Dynamics 365," explains Edayath. “We used Power Automate to pull the daily closing balance on sales, wastage, and inventory and bring it into Dynamics 365 for financial reporting, giving us a real-time view of our restaurant operations.”

Al Babtain has found multiple applications for process automation. One example is a Power Apps solution that automatically updates portfolio values for investment managers, which sends the information back to Power BI for reporting. In its real estate arm, the Group uses Power Pages to provide customers with updated information on vacancies, lease durations, upcoming availability, and other property details.

The journey continues

The company continues to move the needle forward, especially in terms of cybersecurity and analytics. Al Babtain Group plans to adopt the zero-trust framework using Windows Hello and implement Azure Sentinel as its security information and event management (SIEM) solution. It has also already started exploring Microsoft Fabric and Copilot for advanced data modelling and enhanced self-service analytics. “Even though we don't have an extensive team for artificial intelligence and machine learning, we do have a team that's eager to learn and build that expertise. To bridge this gap, Microsoft brings in its best partners, forming a triangle of collaboration, which enables us to deliver results,” adds Edayath.

Whatever lies ahead, the company has built a future-proof environment. “Digital transformation is all about using the right tools to create interconnectivity, enabling users to do more with fewer apps and tools to switch between tasks. The main benefits of Microsoft technologies are scalability, security, automation, collaboration, and the integration,” Edayath concludes. That's the measure of our success—we have secured our operations, streamlined workflows, empowered employees, and enabled quick and informed decision-making.”