John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) announced the launch of a Centre of Excellence (CoE). The CoE will enable enterprise customers to better understand how implementing the latest SAP^® solutions and technologies can help boost the velocity of their businesses and broaden their capability to innovate on all fronts that deliver business value.

The CoE will showcase cross-industry enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions spanning manufacturing, hospitality, services, trade and so on. It will demonstrate how SAP applications incorporate analytics, offering various dashboards and predictive capabilities across lines of businesses. In addition, the centre will showcase some of the latest offerings from SAP, such as the SAP HANA^® platform; SAP Fiori^® user experience; mobile apps; cloud solutions for human capital management from SuccessFactors^®, an SAP company; SAP Lumira^® software; and cloud solutions for supply chain management from Ariba^®, an SAP company. The CoE will continue to showcase the latest solutions when they enter the market.

“SGIT, the IT arm of JKH, has been implementing and supporting SAP software across the customers of the group since 2004 and started offering these services to external organizations in 2008. We have consistently demonstrated close ties with SAP, culminating in a services partnership in 2011, which marked a significant milestone in our relationship. We are delighted about setting up the first-ever CoE in Sri Lanka for SAP solutions,” said Ramesh Shanmuganathan, executive vice president and group chief information officer at John Keells Holdings PLC.

“Through localized solutions, expanded solution/industry portfolio/expertise and the newly launched ‘Centre of Excellence’ we look forward to enabling Sri Lankan customers across private and public sectors to engage, explore, leverage, grow and compete globally with the right enablement of business-aligned technology. This is of significant value in helping a business realize and unleash the full potential of its investments in SAP software, as a platform of choice, through value innovation, and we eagerly await any opportunities to partner with any customer in the journey together with SAP,” he added.

The CoE enables customers to explore a wide range of technologies and solutions that could be of value to their businesses and identify the use cases for adoption. Further, SGIT/JKH has also been an early adopter of SAP solutions and as such, has already embraced SAP HANA, SAP Fiori, SAP Lumira and SAP Screen Personas software. The company is the first conglomerate in Sri Lanka to migrate its database technology to SAP ASE Platform.

The CoE will help deliver customer immersions and proofs of concept and provide enhanced flexibility, agility and innovative offerings in enterprise applications and related space. This will further showcase enhanced value to the market at large with a significant local presence and expertise, and will be complemented by the global reach of the SAP knowledgebase in order to enhance the quality of solutions delivered to local clients.

SGIT provides end-to-end consulting and professional services and can help customers maximize the returns of their investment whilst optimizing the total cost of ownership and benefit as fast as possible while helping ensure that the technology is straightforward to use and easy to administer. Comprehensive services, built-in best practices, including preinstalled infrastructure, integration and jump-start delivery services, further enhance the power of SAP solutions. SGIT also offers customers both proactive and reactive 24×7 support, defined service-level agreements (SLAs), and regular system health checks apart from greenfield SAP software implementations.

Photo caption: Kiran Mrutunjayaa Patil (Channel Sales Manager-India & Sri Lanka, Eco Systems & Channel), Ramesh Shanmuganathan (Executive VP and Group Chief Information Officer, John Keells Holdings PLC), Arne Andersen (Senior VP , Chief Customer Officer, SAP) and Michael Sathasivam (SAP Country Business Head, Sri Lanka) at the new Centre of Excellence.

About JKH: John Keells Holdings PLC (JKH) is the largest listed Company on the Colombo Stock Exchange with a AAA (lka) credit rating from Flitch Rating Lanka Ltd and with business interests in Transportation, Leisure, Property, Consumer Foods & Retail, Financial Services and Information Technology, among others. Since its modest beginnings as a produce and exchange broker in the early 1870s, JKH has been known to constantly re-align, re-position and re-invent itself in pursuing growth sectors of the time. Our investment philosophy is based on a positive outlook, bold approach and commitment to delivery and flexibility to change. JKH is also committed to maintaining integrity, ethical dealings, sustainable development and greater social responsibility in a multi-stakeholder context. Having produced superior returns for our shareholders and experienced significant growth, the Group’s immediate phases of growth are fuelled by our vision: “Building businesses that are leaders in the region.” For more information, visit www.keells.com

About Strategic Group IT – John Keells Holdings PLC: SGIT has decades of experience implementing business solutions and in delivering IT services on SAP software as a platform of choice, not to mention, the best practices and insights that they have gained being part of the Group with business interests spanning Airline and Aviation, Food and Beverages, Integrated Logistics, Property and Real Estate, City Hotels & Restaurants, Holidays & Tours, Plantations & Commodities, Resorts & Spas, Financial Banking, Insurance and Financial Services, IT services & BPO, Ports & Shipping as well as Retail & Loyalty across 70+ businesses, 10,000+ employees in addition to marquee customers they continue to serve external to the John Keells group of companies. For more information, visit www.sgit.keells.com