Unifying business intelligence

We helped SSGIL, a fast-growing company headquartered in Hong Kong SAR, build an enterprise-wide information system that integrates financial, procurement, sales, project, production, and inventory data—an ambitious initiative that has unified and invigorated the company.

Over the past 30 years, Hong Kong–based Shun Shing Group International (SSGIL) had grown from a small family-run trading firm into a vertically integrated commodities corporation with operations stretching from the Pacific Rim to the Middle East. Although SSGIL’s expansion had been extremely successful, its rapid growth led to a complex tangle of incompatible and incomplete data streams. Until they replaced SSGIL’s outdated discrete, yet still expensive, MIS platform, executives knew they would face ever-growing constraints in their ability to monitor and direct their multimarket, multicurrency, and multilingual business operations. To continue to maximize growth, reduce operational risks, and increase the overall transparency of SSGIL’s multiple lines of business, executives realized it was time to further digitalize—and centralize—the company’s business information.

PwC helped SSGIL carry out a business intelligence solution with the implementation of Oracle E-Business Suite across the firm’s most important markets: India, Bangladesh, Hong Kong SAR, and Dubai. Building on this foundation, PwC rolled out a unified, customized data model that would be used to generate descriptive analytical insights to give executives more reliable information on current operations. The model would also make the data more accessible, by building an interface through personalized web-based dashboards and mobile apps.

PwC’s integration of data from financials (including procure-to-pay and order-to-cash working capital data), projects, production, and inventory would serve as the backbone of a comprehensive MIS solution. The new system could produce reports based on a standardized hierarchical framework that included automatic currency conversion and authorization-based security, along with personalized dashboards and graphical data visualization for managing directors and C-suite executives. Once complete, the finance, sales, procurement, project, and manufacturing functions in every unit would have access to the information they needed to optimize their part of the business with reduced risk of inadvertently undermining the efficiency and profitability of the whole.

For the first time since the company’s beginnings, SSGIL’s leaders have a clear, enterprise-wide view of operations with integrated financial key performance indicators. Company strategists can now dive from a top-level enterprise view to business-unit-wise transaction-level detail in a few keystrokes. The dashboard and reporting solution saves nearly 50 person-months of effort in preparation every year, time that can be invested in advanced analysis and decision-making. Functional units have a variety of previously unavailable KPIs that are helping guide them in their decision-making, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement efforts.