Keeping over 200 islands connected is a big feat. This is what Dhiraagu, the first and leading telecommunications provider in Maldives has been doing for over 30 years. However, while this telecom giant has been the market leader, they needed to solve issues relating to customer lifetime value:
- Ensure business continuity through disaster recovery (DR)
- Build cross-functional teams in their offices geographically dispersed in nine regions to collaborate and improve productivity.
- Secure data and comply with data privacy standards.
- Improve total cost of ownership (TCO), maintenance and operating costs on hardware, servers and licenses that were predominantly on-premises and limit their workforce capability to work remotely when the need arises
- Supplier and vendor payment management system were still very manual and paper-based, causing delays in payment and service delivery.
- Leadership team wanted to implement a long-term digital transformation roadmap to improve processes and deliver excellent customer service across the country.
Moving to Microsoft 365 and Azure
Dhiraagu’s partnership with Tech One has started over five years ago, through migration from dated Lotus Notes mail servers to Office licenses. The company has set a long-term roadmap to fully migrate on O365 with almost 400 of 800 employees now on Microsoft 365 and E3 licenses. Once more internet service providers enter in the country, the company will complete this shift to O365.
Now more comfortable on cloud, Dhiraagu further aligned their DR strategy by transitioning some of their public facing apps as well. Initially, the team considered scaling their business applications on-premises or on Amazon Cloud (AWS) but upon reviewing a cost-benefit analysis which included Microsoft Azure, it became an easy win to go for Microsoft solutions. Through Azure IaaS/Paas (Virtual Machine, Reserved Instances, VPN Gateway, Backup Vault, Blob Storage, and Virtual Networks), the company is able to use this cloud environment for B2B and B2C customers to services directly on apps for fleet management and vessel tracking. On Azure, Dhiraagu was able to:
- Reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), maintenance, and operating costs of in-house data center infrastructure by at least 40% versus on-premises.
- Have a more cost-effective solution with Azure’s pay-as-you-go model versus AWS for testing and scaling business and customer-facing applications.
- Achieve high availability of these apps amidst COVID-19.
- Enable DR, secure customer data and comply with data privacy.
Migration to Azure: Long Term Outcome
Tech One worked closely with the Finance Department to digitize paper files and automate this payment approval process. This was made possible through an integration of the client’s existing ERP Microsoft Dynamics AX with SharePoint on Premise and Enadoc as its document management system (DMS).
- Solution runs on Azure service components: App Services, Azure Cognitive Services, SQL & Storage, Data Management, Virtual Machines, Networking. Azure is the only data privacy compliant platform in the market.
- Built-ins are: A user-friendly interface, powerful document/Image capture from any format/whichever state is it in, indexing and search, records management, document security, user & permission controls, keyword search, dynamic redaction, and disaster recovery.
- It seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Content Services Platforms: O365 (SP, Power Apps, Flow) and third-party business apps & systems: ERP, CRM, HRMS, or legacy applications, converting it into an end-to-end ECM solution.
- Enadoc is continuously evolving to address the client’s on-the-go needs. Its companion app Enadoc 365 on Android & IOS allows direct capture/uploads from mobile, web browsers, and multifunctional scanners. Uploads can be further automated through Enadoc’s My Workspace on MS Flows.
- Enadoc is blockchain compatible, which allows a more secure authentication for documents and workflows.
- Enadoc is robotic process automation compatible, which allows for easy integration and zero coding environment for fast deployment of workflows.
Seeing the benefits of completing their digital transformation roadmap, Dhiraagu is now in consultation with Tech One to move to Azure Data Services + PowerBI to enable churn and predictive analysis, management data visualization and dashboards for executive leadership.
Dhiraagu: Better Services through Collaboration and Process Automation
Payment Approval Automation: Paperless is Better
Dhiraagu enabling their digital transformation journey through taking their first step to digitizing and automating the processors which enabled the migration to their cloud journey. For years, Dhiraagu followed a very manual process for supplier and vendor requisitioning, purchasing, and payments.
“We were facing difficulties in approving manual payments in our invoicing system. 60% of the payments are processed through POs, however, around 40% did not go through this process and were ad hoc in nature, requiring physical routing and approvals from respective departments. As the business grew, and when we started rolling out Fiber services, the volume became unmanageable;” Ahmed Asad Hashim, Finance Controller shared. This became a bottleneck because:
- Dhiraagu has over 3000 active suppliers; invoice processing per month averaged 1000
- It became hard to track approvals across 13 departments in 9 offices across Maldives.
- There was much paper involved in the payment approval process. Physical documents were routed from table-to-table, seeking signatures to get approval, some lost or not submitted in transit which led to up to three months. Suppliers were not paid on time, affecting the companies’ relationship with them.
- There was no tracking system in place to identify where delays were happening for process improvement.
Enadoc as a DMS stood out because:
- It is an IP co-sell ready solution; together with Microsoft’s support, this solution has been well-received by over 100 organizations across Asia.
- It runs on Azure service components: App Services, Azure Cognitive Services, SQL & Storage, Data Management, Virtual Machines, Networking. Azure is the only data privacy compliant platform in the market.
- It is the only solution that offers the flexibility of subscription-based cloud, on private cloud or on-premises solutions.
- Built-ins are: A user-friendly interface, powerful document/Image capture from any format/whichever state is it in, indexing and search, records management, document security, user & permission controls, keyword search, dynamic redaction, and disaster recovery.
- It seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Content Services Platforms: O365 (SP, Power Apps, Flow) and third-party business apps & systems: ERP, CRM, HRMS, or legacy applications, converting it into an end-to-end ECM solution.
- Enadoc is continuously evolving to address the client’s on-the-go needs. Its companion app Enadoc 365 on Android & IOS allows direct capture/uploads from mobile, web browsers, and multifunctional scanners. Uploads can be further automated through Enadoc’s My Workspace on MS Flows.
- Enadoc is blockchain compatible, which allows a more secure authentication for documents and workflows.
- Enadoc is robotic process automation compatible, which allows for easy integration and zero coding environment for fast deployment of workflows.
Achieved Benefits and Long-Term Results
With the completion of this workflow automation, Dhiraagu was able to:
- Digitize over 500,000 documents to Enadoc; ensuring DR and business continuity using a hybrid infrastructure.
- Transition from a conventional manual process to digital process automation which was well received by the organization.
- Achieve a more transparent process in corporate governance.
- Optimize processes from 3 months to one week.
- The Finance Team is able to communicate properly to suppliers the status of their payments and move to more productive areas of work.
- Transactions are now paperless, a complete turnaround from previously manual processes.
Hashim further added that “We no longer use paper for invoice approval now. We are doing more than we were doing before—reconciliation and managing supply which we were not able to do before. There was significant increase in productivity and efficiency from our team. Our suppliers are happier. We are able to cater to them and understand them more, bills are being settled and we have better communication with suppliers.”
In the past year alone, Tech One has conducted over 10 sessions for adoption and change management (ACM) which enabled:
- Senior management to fully grasp and utilize Teams and O365 apps for collaboration and productivity (BDM Workshops)
- The creation of a champions group from each of the core departments to guide co-workers on this new technology.
- User trainings on Teams, OneDrive, Outlook, and O365 productivity apps (Team’s adoption workshops). These workshops were conducted by MVPs from Tech One and in the region (see attachment for photos)
- IT admin trainings on infrastructure and security components to simplify IT management.
- Enable a more secure workplace through MFA.
- Achieve larger storage capacity on mailbox and OneDrive and create backup for files.
- Achieve higher productivity through this central hub for collaboration.
- When the country went on lockdown, Dhiraagu was ready for remote-work setup. Over 350 employees are now working from home.
- Board meetings were delayed in the past due to travelling and organizational inertia but now all board meetings are carried out using Teams.
- Planning to host their Annual General Meeting as a virtual event this year (Team’s broadcast session with Live coverage via Youtube)
Hashim further added that “We no longer use paper for invoice approval now. We are doing more than we were doing before—reconciliation and managing supply which we were not able to do before. There was significant increase in productivity and efficiency from our team. Our suppliers are happier. We are able to cater to them and understand them more, bills are being settled and we have better communication with suppliers.”
