In this interview, Dr Faisal Al-Nasser, Chief Technology Officer at Almarai, a leading company in the food industries, reveals the details of the company’s Digital Transformation journey. He discusses how the company is taking serious and deliberate steps in this field. Furthermore, he offers advice to young individuals aspiring to hold prestigious positions in the technology sector.
In your opinion, to what extent is the Information Technology Department at Almarai progressing in its journey towards Digital Transformation? In other words, what has been achieved and what do you aspire to?
In my opinion, the Information Technology management at Almarai is making steady and deliberate progress in its journey towards Digital Transformation. It has achieved several significant milestones, including:
- Establishment of a Business Intelligence Centre: This centre aims to gather and analyse data from various company sources, enabling more precise and efficient decision-making.
- Application of Artificial Intelligence Technologies: Almarai utilises Artificial Intelligence technologies in various areas such as improving productivity, operational efficiency, monitoring the health status of livestock and poultry, providing a better customer experience and many other applications.
- Development of New Digital Applications and Solutions: Almarai has launched numerous new digital applications and solutions across various tracks to enhance operational efficiency, infrastructure and process automation.
These achievements demonstrate the company’s commitment to leveraging technology to drive innovation and improve its operations. As for our aspirations, we aim to continue exploring and implementing advanced technologies to further enhance our digital capabilities and stay at the forefront of the industry.
Regarding future aspirations, Almarai aims to be a leader in Digital Transformation in the food and beverage sector in Saudi Arabia. This goal is pursued through continued investment in digital technologies and strategic partnerships with technology giants to apply and develop digital solutions that meet the needs of its customers and employees. Additionally, Almarai seeks to create an attractive working environment for national talents.
Despite the successes achieved by Almarai in its Digital Transformation journey, there are several challenges it faces, including:
- Intense competition for digital talents in the Saudi job market and retaining them.
- High costs of investment in digital technologies.
- Necessity to keep up with rapid developments in Digital Transformation and the company’s accelerating business growth technologically.
- Continuous search for digital solutions that offer the required added value and are most suitable for the work environment.
- Challenges of cyberattacks and ensuring the highest levels of cybersecurity resilience.
Almarai has the vision and commitment to succeed in its Digital Transformation journey. It will continue to work on overcoming difficulties, facing challenges and achieving its goals.
As a leading company in the field of food industries in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, how does Almarai benefit from the current boom in technology in the Kingdom?
Almarai benefits from the current surge in technology in Saudi Arabia across multiple areas, including:
- Improving Productivity and Operational Efficiency: Technology aids Almarai in enhancing productivity and operational efficiency by automating tasks and improving communication and collaboration among employees.
- Enhancing Customer Experience: Technology helps Almarai improve the customer experience by providing better and more efficient services, such as online shopping and mobile payment options.
- Developing New Products and Services: Technology enables Almarai to develop new products and services by leveraging data and analytics to better understand customer needs.
- Utilising Virtual and Augmented Reality: Almarai uses virtual and Augmented Reality technologies to train employees and provide new educational experiences for customers.
- Utilising Analytics: Almarai employs analytics technologies to understand customer behaviour and improve its marketing campaigns.
Almarai continuously works on enhancing its digital capabilities to make the most of the current surge in technology in Saudi Arabia. This includes partnering with various leading technology companies in different fields to further develop its digital capabilities.
What are the company’s ambitions for the year 2024?
The Almarai Company aims to achieve several ambitions in 2024, including:
- Enhancing its position as a leading company in the food industries in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the region.
- Expanding its business scope in both local and international markets.
- Launching new products and services to meet consumer needs.
- Continuing to invest in Digital Transformation.
What is your philosophy in management in particular? How can a team be managed in different countries?
Your philosophy in management emphasises flexibility and cultural sensitivity, setting a role model, focusing on fostering trust in the work environment and encouraging effective communication.
Additionally, it involves creating a spirit of competition, a culture of appreciation and encouragement for significant achievements and a focus on effective performance measurement culture. You also prioritise training employees to think about what customers need (such as employees in other departments) as a priority, understanding the challenges they face and therefore thinking of appropriate and effective solutions to address those challenges and create real and tangible added value for them, thus making the relationship with departments more resilient.
Managing a team in different countries requires more skills and knowledge of what should be linked to decision-making centrality and what should not. It also involves providing digital monitoring platforms to facilitate performance tracking, task completion and holding regular meetings. It’s important to understand cultural differences among your team members so that you can effectively communicate with them and build trust with them.
How are Almarai’s policies compatible with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s 2030 plan?
Certainly, Almarai’s policies align with Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 in several areas, such as contributing to ensuring food security, enhancing non-oil exports, supporting environmental sustainability goals and promoting a culture of innovation and institutional excellence.
The Arabic language is considered a challenge in the technology market. How do you evaluate this?
The Arabic language is an official language in 22 countries, with approximately 422 million native speakers. This makes it the fifth most widely spoken language in the world. However, its volume is still less than other common languages in the field of technology, such as English and Chinese. Nonetheless, Arabic is a rich and diverse language with many different dialects. However, technologies have been developed primarily in non-Arabic languages and there is also a lack of sufficient resources available for developing Arabic language technologies and their associated requirements, which has created a kind of challenge.
What do you advise young people who want to assume a leadership position in the technology and business sector?
Here is my advice for young people aspiring to take on leadership roles in the technology and business sectors:
- Get the Right Education and Training: It’s important to acquire proper education and training in the field of technology or business. This will help you gain the necessary skills and knowledge to succeed in this field.
- Develop Your Leadership Skills: In addition to technical skills, it’s also important to develop your leadership skills. This will help you lead your team and achieve your company’s goals.
- Be Prepared to Work Hard: Leading a team or a company is not easy. It will require hard work, commitment and perseverance to achieve success.
- Be a Communicator: It’s important to be able to communicate effectively with others, both within and outside your company. This will help you build relationships and collaborate with others to achieve your goals.
- Be Creative: The technology market is fast-paced and it’s important to be able to think outside the box and innovate new ideas. This will help you keep up with developments in the technology field and stay ahead of the competition.
- Be Ready for Change: The technology market is constantly changing and it’s important to be prepared to adapt to these changes. This will help you stay competitive and succeed in this field.
- Customer Experience: Make sure to understand what the customer wants and how to find solutions that provide the value-added they are looking for.
By following these pieces of advice, young individuals can increase their chances of success in leadership roles within the technology and business sectors.
To what extent do you think companies realise the principle of sustainability in their business?
As the largest food and beverage company in the region, Almarai plays a significant social, environmental and economic role locally, regionally and globally. Through the integrated management of our economic, environmental and social performance, we aim to enhance the shared value we create for our stakeholders, now and in the future.
According to our sustainability strategy – for more details, you can refer to the sustainability report on the company’s website – Almarai believes that the world will be a better place if we all commit to improving our performance every day. By fulfiling our commitments, we can make positive changes to build a better tomorrow. When developing our sustainability strategy in 2019 (Better Every Day Performance), we established a set of 25 goals and targets to achieve by 2025, with our strategy focusing on three interconnected pillars and 12 core topics, all of which are essential elements to support our contribution to building a more sustainable future.
Environmental protection is one of the key pillars of Almarai’s sustainability strategy and Almarai’s initiatives in environmental protection include several axes, such as:
Water Management: We strive to use water resources more efficiently every day. Almarai has achieved:
- Increased efficiency in water use across our manufacturing, sales, distribution and logistics departments by 15% by 2025 (compared to the 2018 baseline).
- Launching and supporting co-operative efforts with stakeholders to address water risks and enhance conservation by 2025.
Innovation Management in Packaging: We are committed to reducing the negative impact of our packaging activities on the environment every day. In 2022, we published our position statement on the environmental impact of packaging to convey our transparent approach. We have followed a hierarchical sequence of strategic approaches to identify priorities for reduction, followed by reuse, recycling and redesign, resulting in:
- A reduction of 6,456 metric tons of packaging since 2018.
- A reduction of 4,555 metric tons of total plastic packaging since 2018.
- A reduction of 1,901 metric tons of paper packaging since 2018.
- 70% of cardboard packaging is made from recyclable materials.
- Avoiding the use of 9,000 metric tons of plastic packaging from entering the consumer waste stream by 2025 (compared to the 2015 baseline) and effectively supporting the transition to a circular economy in packaging in Saudi Arabia by 2025.
Climate Change Management: We are committed to applying more sustainable solutions to reduce our emissions every day. In 2022, Almarai achieved:
- A 46% increase in solar energy usage since 2020.
- A 3% reduction in fuel consumption for our sales, distribution and logistics vehicles compared to 2021, which is equivalent to 8.4 million liters less fuel used.
- A 7% decrease in our total fixed energy consumption.
These initiatives reflect Almarai’s commitment to environmental sustainability and its efforts to minimise its environmental footprint while contributing to a better future for all stakeholders.
How can you benefit from Artificial Intelligence in your field of work? Is it a substitute for the human element?
The utilisation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can benefit various practical areas, including but not limited to:
- Improving Translation Quality: AI can enhance translation quality by analysing vast amounts of language data to identify patterns and rules.
- Developing Machine Learning Tools: AI can be used to develop Machine Learning tools that train new language models.
- Creating New Products and Services: AI can create new products and services, such as voice assistants and instant translation applications.
- Archival Research: AI enables searching for specific text within archived files and accessing information quickly and accurately.
- Cyber-resilience: AI can detect cyberattacks early, prevent them, identify suspicious behaviour in some applications and prevent their spread.
- Interactive Service: AI can provide automated responses to customers and solve their problems without human intervention.
- Production Planning: AI can build multiple production plans using available data and analyse them within a very short time frame.
- Detecting Financial Fraud: AI monitors and analyses financial operations to detect and monitor any violations and accounting errors.
- Automated Data Entry: AI can automatically and autonomously input data without human intervention through software robots.
- Consumer Behaviour Analysis: AI analyses consumer behaviour to improve product quality and the types of products they prefer.
- Livestock and Poultry Behaviour Monitoring: AI monitors the behaviour and health status of livestock and poultry.
- Driver Behaviour Monitoring and Analysis: AI monitors and analyses driver behaviour during operations.
However, AI does not entirely replace the human element. It helps improve efficiency and effectiveness, requiring new skills to deal with it. It can be used to enhance operations, make smarter decisions and create new products and services. Nonetheless, human presence remains necessary for error detection and making creative decisions.
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