Jaleel Holdings Partners with Softland to Digitalise Its Field Distribution

Jaleel Holdings, the UAE-based investment company with a turnover of AED 1.8 billion, has announced implementation of a Sales Force Automation program in partnership with Softland India. With this program, Jaleel becomes the first wholesale business in the region to adopt the latest Android mobile app technology for field operations and vehicles fleet management. 

Jaleel Holdings operates the region’s largest wholesale business and distribution of FMCG products, commodities, fresh fruits and vegetables with nearly 30,000 products covering over 15,000 businesses across the UAE.

Jaleel Holdings owns and operates Jaleel Cash & Carry, Jaleel Distribution, J-Mart Hypermarket, Jaleel Foodservice, Jaleel Fresh Produce, Jaleel Fruit & Vegetables, Al Jaleeb Trading, Eastern Condiments MENA, B&J Trading, Orbex General Trading and Jaleel Stratex. These businesses have a large number of daily transactions, using advanced technological solutions that are linked to a backend Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP).

Barato Software Solutions, a subsidiary of Softland India in UAE, introduced the latest digital tool ‘SIL SFA’ to the IT infrastructure of Jaleel Holdings aimed at transforming the daily distribution processes, which provides full control over the operations and helps to get a 360-degree view of the field activities of the salesforce and provide relevant data to them to take timely decisions.

Commenting on the new initiative, Mr. Sameer K Mohamed, Managing Director of Jaleel Holdings, said, “With the rapid developments in technology and the influence of E-commerce on the customer experience, it is imperative for us as a major wholesaler and distributor in the region, to digitalize our operations and remodel ourselves. This will keep us ahead of competition with increased productivity and new services. Technology is the biggest change architect in the modern businesses, and we are integrating the latest technological solutions to our business operations as well. We are happy to implement Softland solution in Jaleel Holdings aimed to enhance our field operations and offer better service to our customers.”

“We have reshaped the region’s wholesale industry for the past two decades by taking pioneering efforts to improve the service. Through these years, we kept re-inventing ourselves by constantly recreating our operational model and adapting new technological solutions to enable a faster, more accurate and cost-effective service. Moreover, the global pandemic has shifted priorities within the distribution and wholesale businesses. We, at Jaleel, feel proud to be the first FMCG business in the UAE to migrate the entire technological workload to Asia’s biggest tier-4 cloud solutions provider in 2017,” he added.

Mr. K Vinod, Executive Director at Softland India, said, “We are proud to implement the SIL SFA solution at Jaleel Holdings. This is a cutting-edge technological transformation, which receives master data from the ERP and makes it available in the Android devices of the field salesmen. This will enhance their day-to-day activities with van sales, billing, merchandising and so forth. The solution comprises of web-based backend application with an array of custom features for operations covering customer activities like order booking, billing, sales returns, payment collection, promotions and product and customer surveys”.

Mr. AbdulGafoor K Mohamed, Executive Director of Jaleel Holdings, said, “Automation of the wholesale field distribution will streamline our B2B sales, increase productivity at a team level, add transparency to the sales process, optimize and harmonize company-wide cooperation that are monitored with the real-time data made available to the sales operations”.

According to him, the sales and delivery team spend a considerable amount of time on the field, visiting customers. “If the time spent enroute is optimised, the sales force can execute their job better and faster. Consequently, a higher number of customers can be served daily resulting in operational and financial benefits.” 

This is a major functional restructuring in the business, after Jaleel Holdings shifted its corporate headquarters to MVK Central in Majan Dubai from its longtime operational base at Al Aweer Central Fruit & Vegetable Market in Ras Al Khor. Jaleel offers a high degree of personalized service to grocers, supermarkets, hypermarkets, convenience stores; and the hotels, restaurants and catering (HoReCa) segment.