John Keells/SGIT wins SAP ACE Award for 3rd time

3 February 2016 12:00 am

Strategic Group IT (SGIT) of John Keells Holdings Plc, the Group’s IT arm as well as a boutique IT Consultancy and Services Organization, has won the SAP ACE (Award for Customer Excellence) Award for the 3rd time. 


They were given this award under the category, “Leveraging in-memory computing” at the recently concluded Award Ceremony hosted by SAP and INDUS at JW Marriott, Mumbai last December. 
This coveted award was presented by Debdeep Sengupta, Managing Director of SAP India to Ramesh Shanmuganathan, Group CIO and the Executive Vice President of John Keells Holdings PLC. 


“We are indeed honoured and at the same time humbled by this award. Big Data and Predictive Analytics are changing the way we do things! We as an organization believe in leading from the front and have been early adopters of technology in creating new frontiers and expanding on it. In this instance too, we are glad that we have lived up to our track record and am especially proud and thankful to the great team at SGIT who continue to explore, incubate and unleash these solutions which are nothing less than cutting-edge. This indeed is a shot in the arm for us and like-minded organizations to continue to explore and create new frontiers and specially in today’s Digital World - creating new paradigms,” Shanmuganathan said.


The award was for the Predictive, Fraud Analytics solution that had been built for “Fraud Analytics” on  SAP’s latest in-memory platform, HANA. This enables companies to use past and present data sets through mathematical and statistical modelling combined with Predictive Analytics in mitigating potentially fraudulent transactions. This enables one to optimize controls whilst helping one to automate and streamline processes, increase stakeholder confidence, and optimize resources.


“The Outlier Analysis tool powered by HANA, takes into consideration an entire population of data to identify any outliers, and potential fraudulent transactions. Quantitative techniques used by mainstream fraud analytics algorithms, facilitate in identifying more focused samples of transactions and outliers which may be stemming from potential frauds or errors. HANA in-memory technology enabled to execute above models in real-time within split seconds”, stated Harsha Senanayake, AVP/Head of Enterprise Applications of SGIT.


The SAP ACE Awards is an annual ceremony honoring companies, businesses and individuals who demonstrate the spirit of innovation by leveraging SAP solutions to transform their businesses. It also felicitates implementation partners of winning projects who played a critical role and paved the way for customers’ success.


Strategic Group IT (SGIT), envisions building Digital and IT as the Core Competitive Capabilities for the Group and their customers and proposes to achieve this by aligning the Digital/IT strategy and related investments to revitalize the business by enabling new business models, best practices and integrating people, processes and technology to unleash the true potential of the organization through Value Innovation.