How a solution for a company created an ecosystem for a nation

AGIS’s revolutionary manufacturing platform 

Following the political uncertainty and supply chain disruptions that started during the pandemic, Al Ghurair Iron & Steel (AGIS) – the largest producer of galvanized flat steel in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with a history stretching back more than 15 years – realized that it was time to embrace the future. 

Despite enjoying a reputation for manufacturing products fashioned to customer requirements and special requests, AGIS needed the technology to strategize long-term planning, monitor supply chain shifts, quickly fulfill orders, and integrate shop floor reporting systems to adapt to short-term changes.

Today’s technology for tomorrow’s goals

Unfortunately, the company’s manufacturing process was hindered by tools that slowed down decision making and impeded the company from achieving its full operational potential. Managing the more than 500,000 metric tons of customer orders was dependent on Excel-based planning and costing, as well as offline, manual communication between the planning, procurement, sales, execution, and quality teams.

Multiple redundant systems affected efficiency.  Changing customer prerequisites led to constant adjustments and delays based on the raw material supply and shifting sales trends. 

By and large, the entire end-to-end process was disjointed, hampering AGIS’s ability to effectively scale production capacity.

Despite this, demand continued to grow, increasing the urgency to streamline planning and execution with Machine Translation (MT) technology.

This needed to be leveraged with computational linguistics and artificial intelligence (AI) as part of a new manufacturing ecosystem that would transform AGIS into an innovation leader.

AI as a unifier      

The Al Ghurair Group’s grassroots heritage has been woven into the fabric of the UAE since 1960, when it began as a small trading business during a time when the country’s mainstays included diving and fishing.  But as the nation advanced, the Al Ghuriar Group helped restyle the business culture, opening the UAE’s first Galvanized Steel Plant (AGIS), flour mill, bank, and shopping mall en route to becoming one of the Middle East’s most diversified business groups.

AGIS, commissioned in 2008, now needed a robust manufacturing solution to boost operational efficiency across the manufacturing process.  The platform’s goals included structuring the workflow for shop floor operators, some of whom had the tendency to become quickly overwhelmed by technological changes.  

Fortunately, that challenge could be eased by providing a unified user interface reliant on automated data logic while limiting the amount of data entry required. 

To lighten the weight of the undertaking, AGIS turned to SAP, the world’s top enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor.  With more than 130 AI scenarios available at the time – some 400 are expected to be implemented by the end of 2025 – SAP boasted the world’s largest AI portfolio.  And because of the amount of SAP software already being utilized by AGIS via SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP), adoption would be simplified.

SAP, in turn, chose Deloitte as a participating partner.  The multinational professional services specialist proposed important design aspects of a solution built largely upon SAP Business AI.  

The collaboration would enable the AGIS to refine the solution to meet operational needs by calculating plant maintenance, inventory, procurement, environmental, safety, and health issues, and other concerns into the algorithm.

Production planning and execution would now be automated based on order requirements, while dashboards with automated controls kept track of the end-to-end processes. 

Precision Bionetwork

The three-way partnership led to AGIS deploying the solution in December 2024.

Predicted the company’s CEO, Abu Bucker Husain, “With the innovative SAP Business AI solution, we will optimize processes, integrate value chains, and improve data-driven decision making.”

The statement quickly proved to be prophetic. 

For the first time, AGIS has been able to shatter the data silos that slowed production efficiency.

The use of AI allows the platform to automate more than 300 complicated processes and material calculations based on some 90 attribute variations, tracking raw material availability, and proposing more than 120 business and logic quality parameters. This speeds up order execution, QA inspections, and ensures every product meets high-quality standards — with less effort from the team. 

And with 90 percent process digitization, the accuracy, legitimacy, and extensiveness of customer orders can be evaluated and executed in a period that would have previously been unfathomable.

For example, order planning time has plummeted from 15-to-20 minutes to less than five, while the unified operator dashboard has diminished the batch execution time from eight to ten minutes to less than three.

Every day, more than 1,800 orders are processed – five times the previous amount – leading to an 80 percent increase in end-to-end production planning.

AGIS now uses the BTP capabilities to capture real-time data for reporting, providing insights into sustainability metrics and production efficiency to track and report on its environmental efforts. 

As a result of these trailblazing improvements, AGIS was honored as a winner in the Transformation Titan category at the SAP Innovation Awards in 2025, a yearly event celebrating organizations using SAP technology to change the way business is conducted. You can glean further details about AGIS’s accomplishment in their pitch deck.

The recognition embodies the modern version of a company respecting the traditions of yesterday while reshaping tomorrow.

To learn more, visit us here.