Tropical General Investments (TGI) Group is an international investment and holding company with diversified interests and investments across Africa, The Middle East, Asia and other emerging markets. TGI Group owns over a hundred leading brands in Fast Moving Consumer Goods, Agricultural Inputs, Industrial Chemicals, Homecare Products and Pharmaceuticals.
As part of TGI technology strategy, TGI needed a consolidated productivity platform to enhance collaboration and productivity. Prior to our engagement, TGI had siloed solution for their different Business units which did not meet their digital transformation needs. Hybrid work models had begun to take its roots at TGI and teams needed co-engagement, collaborative platforms to keep operations efficient. Emails communication and phone calls were no longer enough in getting the required engagement on initiatives and inefficiency around engagement needed to be quickly addressed.
The organization relied on 3rd party chat tools, email platform with frequent downtimes and no document management systems in place. The impact on business operations was staggering and information flow to field teams was slow and inefficient.
Across the business units, the business problems needed to be solved, which secure platform will offer greater engagement across teams? How do we ensure business data transmission is shared on secure communication platforms? How do we drive culture change towards agile communication, democratize intelligence across the entire organization? These were the question TGI sought out to solved.
Embarking on this journey with TGI required that Reliance Infosystems migrates data from the legacy platforms to Microsoft Cloud productivity Platform, drive adoption and change management, modernize the workplace experience and democratize intelligence across the entire organization for 2,000 users at a cost of $350,000. Modern Work and security solutions were recommended for implementation.
Reliance Infosystems onboarded TGI on Microsoft 365 successfully to improve field teams operations experience since it greatly impacted sales revenue. Value derived from Microsoft Teams was impactful. Prior to onboarding on MS Teams, Field representatives relied on emails to get approvals and updates from the office. With MS Teams, decision making, and updates became “on-the-Go.” engagement and operational efficiency grew geometrically. Cost of subscription for other video conferencing solutions were discontinued as the cost of M365 single license provided email, video conferencing and document sharing services to users. IT reported significant reduction in OPEX expenditure on call credits and subscriptions. Speeding up collaboration among over 1,600 users servicing 3 million consumers of TGI brands daily was indeed laudable.
Typical approvals took about 2-5 hours and often required employees following up with calls. Users loved to attach and re-attach several versions of documents by email. Sharing of files or links to documents for instant collaboration was not possible and employees struggled to keep up with versioning.
With OneDrive, TGI employees began to see new possibilities with collaboration. Whiteboarding and joint content development and delivery became possible and was very well embraced by the teams in the delivery of task. IT team recounted “Our reach and response speed to queries from customer are positively impacted since we can now collaborate faster, approvals are visible and on-the-go”.
We had dedicated resources prior to M365 who focused on building reports. The traditional approach was to get these report builders meet with functional users and build report. This approach was ineffective and suffered a great deal as users were often not satisfied with delivery. Largely delayed and rarely meet the needs of the functional users. With PowerBI we were able to democratize the design and delivery of reporting function. Functional users were trained on the use of PowerBI and began to creat their own reports since license where now available for use and knowledge transfer for PowerBI provided to users. TGI credits the increased productivity to Microsoft 365.
We have continued to focus on helping our customers digitally transform their operations creating a reliable partnership that drives the achievement of collective objectives. On top of the Microsoft 365 stack we also introduced the Digital workspace value-add to TGI. This solution is built on the foundation of Microsoft SharePoint Online, Digital Workspace is a modern productivity platform where all business tools are converged for centralized access and simplified experience. The platform also provides for elaborate mechanism for envisioning, digitizing, automating, and onboarding new business processes at the speed on thought. This solution allows us to differentiate ourselves from the pack in terms of value-add to the Microsoft 365 stack of offerings for our customers in their digital transformation journeys.
In recognition of our commitment to digital transformation, Reliance Infosystems was recently awarded the Digital Transformation company of the year 2021 issued by the Beacon of Information & Communications Technology in addition to the Microsoft country partner of the year 2021. These awards are testaments to the great achievements of Reliance Infosystems in digitally transforming businesses while helping customers lower costs, improve efficiency, and boost productivity.
TGI was worried about migration and wanted the transfer of email platform to be seamless. They needed some assurance that our approach to the project will deliver expected outcome. Through the help Microsoft Nigeria team, Joel Shaibu, Tosin Okubanjo and Oluwaremi Olowu support need during the sales conversion phase was achieved Please we need to paint a story of working with Microsoft to conduct Business Value Assessment which led to solution envisioning and finally customer’s commitment. TGI was reassured of our competency in delivery which gave the customer comfort to proceed.
Migration of email boxes was going to be a challenge considering the requirement of TGI for zero downtime, lack of robustness of the proprietary mail hosting platform, and mailbox duplicates that existed on the platform. We deployed Microsoft IMAP migration wizard to migrate their emails and results were awesome. We were able to achieve zero downtime on mailboxes and the cut-over was seamless. Established new consumption needs around SharePoint and Azure.
Recent testimonials showcase countless positive feedbacks from Customers on the roles Microsoft technologies is playing in their environments to help them increase productivity and reduce cost. View attached links for feedback from several Reliance infosystems customers who are today, leveraging the opportunities provided by Microsoft cloud platforms in delivering business outcomes.
As at FY 2022, our deployment foot print for M365 spans across the following organisations but not limited to the list here. UAC Group, OVH Energy, Oando, Enterprise Group Ghana, we have continued to help these organisations create new possibilities with Microsoft 365 platform. Currently we are developing new personalized apps with power platform and hosting on Teams to allow UAC support its business processes in a more flexible manner accommodate the frequent changes within the operating environment.
