Naim Group

The company

Located in Kuching, East Malaysia, Naim Holdings Ber-had is the holding company for its 100% owned subsidiary, Naim Land Sdn Bhd (NLSB), which is involved in property development and construction. The principal areas of its business are:

• Integrated property developments combining residential, commercial and industrial properties with infrastructure and public amenities
• Construction, civil engineering, oil, gas and infrastructure projects
• Oil and gas services through investment in Dayang Enterprise Holdings Bhd

Naim Holding's flagship property developments are Bandar Baru Permyjaya in Miri, Desa Ilmu in Kota Samarahan, and the up-market Riveria satellite township in Kuchings southern corridor. These developments are reinforced by a number of smaller residential and commercial developments in Sarawaks major population centers.
Together, these developments provide more than 25,000 homes and commercial buildings with a com-bined population of over 110,000. Including implementation of NLSBs own development projects, it has carried out more than RM5.8 billion worth of construction works and has an order book worth over RM2.8 billion. The company focuses on excellent quality and timely delivery, a philosophy that has earned Naim Holdings a host of industry awards.

The challenge

Naim Holdings has been using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets to input, store and consolidate company data.

When the company grew, the increasing number of spreadsheets that came with it makes comparing figures and producing reports rather tedious. As such, they started searching for a tool that can effectively provide professional budgeting and planning. The company identified and compared three possible tools from the market: Board, Clarity Systems and Hyperion. Board stood out as the best choice for several reasons:

• Users from other departments who are not well-versed in IT can easily navigate and work on the system
• Board's flexibility and scope enables customization of profound management reports
• Comparable cost-effectiveness for setting up and maintaining the software
• Board's programming-free toolkit allows for Naim Holdings IT Department to easily perform software development on their end at their own time and pace

The Board solution

Due to Board's user-friendliness and power-packed training sessions, the IT Team at Naim Holdings successfully implemented the following modules in their Board application:

• Manpower Planning
• Operational Costs
• Profit and COS Recognition for trading business sector
• Property Sales and Cost Budgeting Reporting
• Cash Flow
• Comprehensive Income
• Revenue & COS
• No. of Units Sold
• Sales Value

For them, Board has become the central budgeting and planning tool providing readily retrievable information and strong daily administrative support. After the initial stage involving transfer of information and processes from the various departments and subsidiaries to Board application, users promptly filled up whatever missing information required and the system promptly kept up-to-date. Depending on the user type, they are empowered to create new projects or statements which are yet to be included in the source system. With this feature, managers can introduce new real-time measures whenever higher management makes changes to existing policies. The versatility of Board enables a string of different reports to be produced with the same type of data. This data, once input into the application, is extremely secure and at no risk of data loss.

The customer benefit

In a fast expanding property and construction company like Naim Holdings, using the Board application is significantly more efficient and time-saving than Excel spreadsheets.

The multi-user interface of Board allows different users to work and update information all at the same time. This results in increased productivity across company employees.

Due to its automation and customization processes, Board has fewer number of consolidation and calculation processes which are also less complicated. The resulting ease of computation not only minimizes human errors and mistakes arising from linking two or more modules, it enables speedier re-generation of reports for business plans that have changed.

The IT Team continues to make changes to their Board application in response to future needs and for greater value added to the company. Besides enhancing the present modules with expert comments gathered from users, the company is looking to make a list of developments:

• Introduction of Property Investment Business Planning module
• Admin Expenses Budget
• Capital Expenditure
• Introduction of HR module
• Headcount data inputs
• Staff Cost data input