Sunshine Holdings, a diversified holding company with interests in healthcare, agribusiness, fast-moving consumer goods and renewable energy, is driving business value and innovation with its new analytics platform based on Microsoft Azure technologies, which it uses to consolidate data and provide analytics across its group of companies. 

“Microsoft continues to be a critical partner in our digital transformation journey,” said Sunshine Holdings Group Chief Digital Officer Infiyaz Ali. 

“As we expand our partnership, we are demonstrating that Microsoft technology is a fundamental tool for building more transparent businesses and helping our employees and various business units to access more and better information. We will continue to look at new ways of boosting the productivity and efficiency of our employees.”

Over 1,300 employees are now making data-based decisions based on subtle insights and forecasts from data previously spread over multiple siloed enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Sunshine Holdings utilises the Microsoft Azure platform for data storage and management and Power BI for its customisable dashboards, ability to analyse data from multiple sources and functionality. The deployment of new technologies was conducted in-house. 

“We can now explore how to work with a fully managed, integrated data analytics service that blends data warehousing, data integration and big data processing with accelerated time to insight,” said Sunshine Holdings Manager Data Science 
Dhanushka Abeyratne. 

“With Microsoft Azure, we expect to reap rich dividends from becoming a digitally enabled enterprise. The platform’s scalability, compatibility and integration with other ERP systems is truly remarkable.”

Sunshine Holdings has also adopted Microsoft 365 as its unified communication platform to promote employee collaboration and efficiency. Tools like Microsoft Teams break down silos by allowing employees to communicate with each other across various business units. In addition, Power Apps helps employees build intelligent applications that integrate their business data.

“Sunshine Holdings is transforming and visualising data with a modern and scalable data solution that eliminates data silos and unifies business data,” said Microsoft Asia Pacific General Manager Southeast Asia New Markets Sook Hoon Cheah.

“Microsoft Azure provides a unified workspace for all things data to support the needs of the modern workforce. Organisations across Southeast Asia can dramatically increase transparency, build better monitoring systems and empower employees to move more quickly. Going forward, we’re eager to expand our collaboration with Sunshine Holdings to give their employees the best productivity and security experience with Microsoft 365 and other Microsoft cloud services.”

Sunshine Holdings is actively expanding its use of data analytics and is transitioning into new verticals including descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. The company sees investment in key big data analytics technologies as central to the success of its digital transformation goals.