Hayel Saeed Anam Group (HSA Group) has been recognized as a WBA Winner for Business Transformation in the World Business Awards 2022. The World Business Award for Business Transformation [BTR] recognizes organizations that have successfully implemented initiatives that demonstrate excellence in business transformation.

HSA Group – Yemen Region (“HSA”) is Yemen’s leading and largest private sector company, employing over 20,000 people across the country. It is the founding entity of HSA Group, a family-owned conglomerate that is today one of the largest multinational businesses in the Middle East. HSA has operated in Yemen and the wider region since it was founded as a small retail shop by four brothers in 1938. Today, HSA has maintained its strong links with communities across Yemen, serving millions daily in the country and beyond and is a key player in global trade networks.

HSA is a market leader across a number of sectors, including FMCG, Industrial, Trading and Services. The company manufactures and supplies essential foods and services to multinational organizations, communities and families, both in Yemen and across the MENA region. HSA’s offering ranges from household products, healthcare essentials and automotive vehicles to key services such as insurance and financial services.

Led by Mr Nabil Hayel Anam Saeed, HSA has embarked on an unprecedented investment programme – the Transformation Journey – that is focused on the critical role that HSA Yemen can and should play in supporting the future of its people and of Yemen. The Transformation Journey was launched in 2019 with an aim to future-proof and equip the organization with the tools, capabilities, skills and people to lead in the future, as it has in the past.

HSA has achieved its success in the midst of a rapidly evolving and unpredictable external operating environment in Yemen, significant change across the region, and the global pandemic. With over 50 operating companies in Yemen, HSA’s leadership recognized that its previous approach of siloed business units operating independently of each other was no longer viable in such a rapidly changing environment. Through the implementation of new systems and processes, HSA’s leadership sought to unify the business – connecting employees, management and leadership and standardizing how HSA operating companies engage with external parties, such as its customers, suppliers, or partners.

In 2019, the company embarked on its Transformation Journey with a clear goal, to overcome the challenges faced by the organization and enable the company to lead in the future as it has in the past. This programme was designed to unify the way that the operating companies conduct business and standardize processes to optimize costs and outputs. An action plan was created that would ensure internal engagement and alignment across their business operations. To achieve HSA’s objectives, A core element of the Transformation Journey facilitated the initiative across the other functions as the digital transformation plan. HSA partnered with world-leading technology and business infrastructure partners, Microsoft and SAP, to design and implement state-of-the-art business platforms to unify the business and provide HSA with comparable technological solutions to its key partners. Systems such as Office 365, Power BI, SAP SuccessFactors and SAP’s logistics platforms accelerated collaboration across the company. This also enabled standard processes to measure and report progress against the KPIs set in the Transformation Journey.

The Transformation Journey has helped HSA to become an agile and adaptive organization that is able to react swiftly to change and take advantage of opportunities when they are presented. It has also prepared a strong foundation from which the company can continue to build moving into the future. The organizational transformation to date has brought in highly skilled people and created a robust organizational structure that provides smooth and effective management. Breaking down silos has enabled synergies and collaboration, which meant all available resources were properly utilized across companies, most notably the work done by the digital, financial and human resources teams. Despite the complications caused by the onset of COVID-19 and the wider operational challenges in Yemen, HSA was remarkably able to achieve the vast majority of the aims it set for its strategic pillars at the outset of the Transformation Journey.