GBM, a leading IT solutions and service provider, announced the successful execution of one of the largest payroll system in the region for Abu Dhabi based Al Jaber Group, a leading regional conglomerate and the UAE's largest private sector employer.

As part of the project, the company implemented the Human Resources and Payroll modules of Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Release 8.11 for Al Jaber Group. The project involved setting up the employee records and the payroll processing for more than 37,000 employees in different Al Jaber companies across the region.

Handling over 60,000 employee master records, Al Jaber Group owns a range of companies in construction, engineering, logistics, industrial, automotive, technology and trading segments.

"GBM has just helped us pull off a very successful payroll implementation project of the scale and scope rarely matched in the Middle East. In fact, this is one of the largest Oracle-JDEdwards based payroll system implementations in the world," said Balashankar Das, Group Chief Information Officer, Al Jaber Group. "We turned to GBM since the system's developer was unable to support localisation efforts of JDEdwards EnterpriseOne's HRMS module. We firmly believed that GBM could deliver desired results and they did, in spectacular fashion."

He added, "The GBM team's adaptation to the Al Jaber work culture was a significant contributor to the success of the project. We now have a stable and robust payroll system that was implemented with zero code changes ."

As the system developer doesn't support the customized implementations, all gulf specific requirements are being implemented by GBM using standard functionality only which gives customers the confidence for the future version upgrades and full technical support by Oracle.

As an existing user of Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne software, Al Jaber Group's decision to upgrade existing payroll systems was based on a combination of growth-driven business requirements and the ability to standardize and streamline payroll processes and smooth integration with other business systems.

"This project was perfect for GBM, as we have extensive capabilities in implementing Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne - especially the Human Resources and Payroll systems. Given the present economic climate, customers are looking to maximise on cost effectiveness and processes synergy, with minimal implication to the other business systems and general IT operations of the company. This is our speciality and we believe that the Al Jaber Group implementation is the perfect example," said Akram Jawahry, Country General Manager for GBM Abu Dhabi.

The Al Jaber Group deployment is one of the latest additions to GBM's list of extensive infrastructure projects and high profile assignments.