Case Study · Construction & Engineering

Digitizing the workflows behind the region’s landmark projects

How a 70-year-old infrastructure giant is rebuilding its digital core — one department at a time.

Unveiled at a launch event in April 2025, the project set out to develop and integrate the Group’s internal operations through a unified system built on modern Oracle technologies — improving operational efficiency, facilitating decision-making, supporting resource planning, and achieving better integration across departments. Its roadmap spanned current-state analysis, solution design, system implementation, full go-live, and capacity building — training the Group’s software developers on the new development and integration tools, and training end users to operate the system efficiently in their daily work. It represents a qualitative leap on the Group’s path to full digital transformation.

Across the world, the organizations that build nations — roads, bridges, dams, metros, ports — are discovering that their biggest constraint is no longer concrete or steel. It is data. Decades of growth leave large infrastructure groups running on a patchwork of aging systems that don’t talk to each other, and the gap between what happens on the job site and what leadership can see in the corporate books keeps widening.

The instinct is often to rip everything out and start over. But there is a smarter path — one that preserves hard-won operational knowledge while moving it onto a modern, governable foundation.

Khwarizm’s recent work with a leading regional infrastructure conglomerate shows what that path looks like — and what scale can achieve.

We are proud to partner with the region’s largest contracting organization on a transformation of this ambition.

A fragmentation problem at scale

Our client is one of the premier construction and infrastructure conglomerates in the Middle East and Africa. For nearly seventy years it has delivered civil engineering, monumental restoration, marine works, and some of the region’s largest public infrastructure. It operates through dozens of specialized departments — from heavy-equipment leasing and ready-mix concrete production to on-site project management — across tens of thousands of employees and multiple countries.

That very scale had become a source of friction. Each department had, over the years, built its own legacy systems. Those systems captured real expertise, but they were aging, isolated, and increasingly hard to maintain. Data lived in silos. Reporting to the Holding Company meant manual re-keying and slow, error-prone reconciliation.

With projects on the scale we run, locally and across the region, automating our technical and financial operations is not optional — it demands flexible, deeply integrated solutions.

Taking stock

The trigger for change came from two directions at once.

At the top, the Holding Company committed to a defining move: implementing a brand-new, full Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) as a single, authoritative system of record for finance, procurement, and enterprise operations. For the first time, there would be one modern corporate core.

At the same time, the regulatory bar rose. As a public-sector entity, the Group falls under the oversight of the national Supreme Audit Institution, which had just adopted new Performance and Compliance Audit Standards — aligned with the INTOSAI Framework of Professional Pronouncements — that its regulated entities are obliged to meet. Modernization was no longer a matter of efficiency alone. It was a matter of accountability.

The question was how to carry decades of departmental knowledge into that new world without losing it — and without forcing every department into a rigid mold that its people would quietly work around.

Reinventing the departmental stack

Khwarizm and the Group began by reframing the challenge. Rather than a single, one-size-fits-all rollout, the team designed a two-tiered architecture that respected how each department actually works.

The first tier was the departments themselves. After deep operational assessments across the business units, the team rebuilt the aging legacy systems as modern, Oracle-native applications on Oracle APEX, Oracle’s low-code platform. Each application was tailored to the real workflow of the people using it — standardizing how data is captured at the source while keeping the experience familiar enough to earn adoption from on-site engineers and project managers.

Crucially, the work didn’t stop at replacement. The team delivered entirely new applications the departments had never had before — including a dedicated Projects application — extending what each unit could do rather than simply preserving the past.

We committed to managing the roadmap with precision — from analyzing the current state and designing tailored solutions, through full go-live, to preparing the people who would run the system every day.

Connecting the field to the core

The decisive move was integration. The team engineered a secure, high-availability pipeline that pushes validated transactions from the APEX applications directly into the new Oracle EBS.

Today, millions of micro-transactions — payroll data, material procurement costs, inventory logs, project milestones — are captured locally and synchronized with Oracle EBS in near real-time. Because both layers are Oracle-native, the connection is tight and reliable rather than a fragile bridge between mismatched worlds. Manual re-entry and reconciliation, once a daily tax on the organization, largely disappeared.

Integrating these systems ends complex manual processes and creates a smart, connected backbone — one that supports the digital economy and the construction sector alike.

Built for accountability

Because the transformation had to satisfy the Supreme Audit Institution’s new standards, audit readiness was engineered in from the start, not bolted on. Four principles anchored the design: compliance controls enforced at the point of data entry, so non-compliant transactions never enter the system; performance data that lets auditors and managers judge the economy, efficiency, and effectiveness of resource use; end-to-end traceability, so every figure in the corporate books can be traced to its originating field transaction, user, and timestamp; and strong governance through role-based access, segregation of duties, and automated validation.

The result is a platform that turns external oversight from a burden into a byproduct of how the organization now runs.

The results

The change is most visible in the small things that used to cost the organization dearly. Scaled across dozens of departments, those changes compound. Leadership at the Holding Company now has a real-time, enterprise-wide view of performance inside Oracle EBS. Project delivery and resource allocation across distributed job sites have accelerated. And the Group has a modern, supportable, standards-aligned foundation it can extend to new business units and mega-projects as it grows across the continent.

This is a qualitative leap in our full digital transformation — a unified system that connects every department, raises day-to-day operational efficiency, and puts accurate, real-time data in the hands of decision-makers.

The stakes for an infrastructure group of this scale are high: the systems that run the business ultimately shape the projects that shape a nation. But the lesson travels well beyond one conglomerate.

This partnership lets the Group draw on Oracle’s latest global ERP technologies — and the close cooperation among all three partners is the key to delivering them smoothly and to the highest international standards.