Mohamed Yousuf Naghi & Brothers Group commenced its journey back in 1911, when a resident from Jeddah, Mohamed Abdulwahab Naghi laid the foundation of the company.

The business started on a humble note, as a simple distribution establishment for several products. With the aspirations drawn from his father, the late Yousuf Mohamed, Naghi evolved the business with a vision for sustainable growth while partnering with blue chip companies.

Today, MYNaghi Group is continuing the journey of success with full accountability based on solid ethics, which results in delivering remarkable services to
its stakeholders, thus ensuring their interests and goals are well respected. Although its core business has always been distribution and logistics, the group has diversified its activities into the transportation and financial auto lease services. With its headquarters in Jeddah, the group operates throughout Saudi with a comprehensive network of offices, warehouses and showrooms. Its luxury car division is perhaps one of the most famous brands within the group however it also has operations in a wide number of areas including fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). Its partners and brand portfolio includes: Mars, Reckitt Benckiser, L’Oreal, BMW, Mini, Jaguar, Land Rover, Rolls Royce, Hyundai, Ankai and Tata, in addition to many other renowned companies and brands from around the world.

With such extensive operations the group’s IT platform had developed independently of other units:

• MYNaghi Group had nine different email systems and 15 IT domains

• Up to 4 people were required on a daily basis to support the email systems

• Group management wanted to integrate the disparate systems to enable collaboration across the group and create a single email address book  

Aziz A. Rahim, Director of Group IT Infrastructure, MYNaghi Group, explains that one of the first considerations was to build an in-house messaging platform. Consequently, a total cost of ownership and benefit/risk assessment was carried out. The findings were compared to the same analysis of a hosted platform. The benefits of a hosted platform were much more advantageous and as a result MYNaghi Group moved to a comparison between Microsoft and Google.

Aziz A. Rahim said: “It was clear that as a whole Microsoft Office 365 was a much more practical solution. It’s comprehensive, very scalable and the overall financial benefits were much better. There was also the added benefit that it would integrate with our existing Outlook email and the interface was familiar to the majority of the
people in the group. The pre-sales engagement from Microsoft Partner (Ctelecoms) was also persuasive and engaging, which gave us a lot of confidence.” Ctelecoms is an expert in Microsoft cloud technologies.

With the right tools, migration strategy and appropriate training, MYNaghi Group had a smooth migration with no downtime, no user problems, and achieved the following:
• Implementing Office 365 E3 plan for 3,700 users

• Implementation started in January and was completed in April

• The latest versions of Office 365 ProPlus software were also implemented including Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint

• SSO for all MYNaghi Group domains and users

• Complete email data migration

• Provides business-class email through a rich and familiar Outlook experience accessed from a desktop or from a web browser using Outlook Web App

• 50 GB mailbox per user and ability to send attachments up to 25 MB

• Unites different domains and creates single email system on a cloud platform

The introduction of Office 365 has not only enabled MYNaghi Group to meet its initial objectives of unifying different emails systems and domains but has also led to a
number of cost and time-savings benefits. Aziz A. Rahim explains: “We’ve seen productivity increases, cost savings, a dramatic reduction in the time required for managing and troubleshooting, overall some really major benefits. At the same time the migration was very smooth, with no critical issues and we also have extremely good availability.”
• The standardization of IT has led to a drop of more than 50 percent in IT incident tickets with 30 percent less resolution time.

• The more than 50 percent reduction in IT incidents led to immediate cost-saving benefits within the first month of Office 365 usage

• Previously a team of four IT technicians were required to handle the messaging infrastructure. This has now been reduced to two IT technicians who are partially assigned to manage Office 365

• The freeing up of IT technician time has led to an increase of up to 90 percent in productivity on new business enhancing technology initiatives

• The average cost of managing each mailbox has fallen by approximately 30 percent while email availability is 99.9 percent

• Collaboration across the group has significantly increased with employees from the group’s 40 plus companies now able to easily communicate with each other, which in turn is driving group-wide efficiencies

• Office 365 has been implemented across mobile devices enabling employees to access their mailboxes on the move

• Simplifies compliance by enabling archiving easy to find documents by searching across mailboxes, team sites, and recorded meetings

• Group wide collaboration set to receive further boost with the introduction of SharePoint and Lync, further components of Office 365