Elly Yates-Roberts |
Sri Lankan healthcare and retail firm Sunshine Holdings is driving its digital transformation with a new analytics platform based on Microsoft Azure technologies, which it uses to consolidate data and provide analytics across its group of companies.
With the new platform, the business – which has interests in healthcare, agribusiness, fast-moving consumer goods and renewable energy – has enabled its over 1,300 employees to make decisions based on insights and forecasts from data that was previously spread over multiple siloed enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
“Microsoft continues to be a critical partner in our digital transformation journey,” said Infiyaz Ali, group chief digital officer of Sunshine Holdings. “As we expand our partnership, we are demonstrating that Microsoft technology is a fundamental tool for building more transparent businesses and helping our employees and various business units to access more and better information.”
Sunshine Holdings is using the Microsoft Azure platform along with Power BI for its customisable dashboards and to analyse data from multiple sources.
“We can now explore how to work with a fully managed, integrated data analytics service that blends data warehousing, data integration and big data processing with accelerated time to insight,” said Dhanushka Abeyratne, manager of data science at Sunshine Holdings. “With Microsoft Azure, we expect to reap rich dividends from becoming a digitally enabled enterprise. The platform’s scalability, compatibility and integration with other ERP systems is truly remarkable.”
The firm has also adopted Microsoft 365 as its unified communication platform to promote employee collaboration and efficiency.
“Sunshine Holdings is transforming and visualising data with a modern and scalable data solution that eliminates data silos and unifies business data,” said Sook Hoon Cheah, general manager of Southeast Asia new markets at Microsoft Asia Pacific. “Going forward, we’re eager to expand our collaboration with Sunshine Holdings to give their employees the best productivity and security experience with Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft cloud services.”