19 October 2005
GRAND Stores, a leader in the marketing and distribution of luxury brands in the UAE, to further its strategic transformation plan to streamline its business, improve operational efficiency and enhance customer service across its retail showrooms in the UAE, has signed up with Bahwan CyberTek as the implementation partner for the deployment of Oracle E-Business Suite across the branches. The project is aimed at automating a number of key business processes, including finance, distribution, sales, marketing and services (CRM). It is also building a unique business intelligence framework on top of its core applications to extract powerful information for improved decision-making.

Grand Stores chose the Oracle E-Business Suite in May 2005. Followed by this, Grand Stores floated an RFP and invited several leading Oracle Implementers and after thorough evaluation of their capabilities selected Bahwan CyberTek.

"We wanted to choose a partner who had the domain knowledge and relevant expertise in implementing Oracle Applications. Bahwan CyberTek was the obvious choice considering its credentials and rich experience," said Mohammed Abu Issa, managing director of Grand Stores. "They came across as truly professional and clearly understood our business requirement which gave us the comfort, making our choice that much easier," he added. The project is expected to go live in about 8 to 10 calendar months.

Grand Stores' diverse business covers a broad spectrum of products from photography, perfumes, and cosmetics, to luggage, linen and exquisite dinnerware. The organisation carries more than 100 world-class brands such as Nikon, Fujifilm, Chanel, Givenchy, Nina Ricci, Gucci, Samsonite and Lacoste. Currently, Grand Stores has a wholesale distribution agreement with more than 1,500 outlets in the UAE and maintains more than 500 staff.

Husam Dajani, Oracle's vice-president for the Middle East and Africa, expresses Oracle's commitment to providing the region's retail market with the solutions they need to sustain their growth. "Oracle is fully committed to empowering enterprises such as Grand Stores with the ability to develop their businesses and realise the highest return on investment from their resources. Moving forward, I am confident that Grand Stores will reap the benefits of this choice and continue its rapid development in the UAE."

Bahwan CyberTek has operations spanning across Oman, the UAE, the US and India with nearly 500 professionals worldwide. Bahwan CyberTek is a Red Herring Asia 100-2005 (amongst the Top 100 private, technology companies in whole of Asia) and assessed at SEI-CMMi level 5, the most stringent software quality standard for software companies defined by Carnegie Melon Institute. As a very successful Oracle Partner, Bahwan CyberTek is considered amongst the Top Strategic Partners for Oracle in the region with more than 65 implementations to its credit and was recognised with the Oracle Business Excellence Award in 2004. Starting as a regional IT company, it has now emerged as a world-class IT products and services organisation with clientele spread across geographies.

Bahwan CyberTek in the UAE is located in Dubai Internet City and has several prestigious customers across the Emirates.

S. DurgaPrasad, director and chief executive officer of Bahwan CyberTek, said: "Grand Stores is a prestigious customer for us. Bahwan CyberTek will bring its rich industry experience in architecting the solution framework, which will give Grand Stores better visibility and insight into its operations. We are committed to build a Business Intelligence model, which would help the management and the workforce in effective decision-making. I am confident that Grand Stores will benefit from this partnership and achieve the objectives of this strategic initiative."

© Times of Oman 2005