Client background

Client: Medical device and pharma manufacturing company

Industry: Health and pharma 

Services: Manufacturing of goods in pharma, medical devices and consumer health sectors

Number of employees: More than 1.3 lakh employees

Challenge

• Through multiple acquisitions, the client had accumulated 109 ERP platforms supporting business processes related to supply chain management, finance, procurement and customer transactions, most of which were redundant. The interfaces connecting them were, in turn, carrying redundant information.
• As these acquired companies were following different data format standards and processes, ERP business processes lacked standardization.
• The ERP applications lacked interconnectivity and the estimated ERP investments were ballooning to almost $200 mn per year 
• Existing ERPs were scattered across geographies and the client was not able to get a single view of the actual inventory available.

This got the client’s advanced planning and scheduling (APS) into a fix.

Solution

91¿ì»îÁÖ’s integration engagement with the client involved consolidation of multiple ERP platforms to one ERP platform per geography viz. Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Middle East. This was achieved through a discrete integration approach to form a single, scalable and robust middleware design along with generic frameworks (IntermediateDocument handler framework, Flatfile and XML framework), standardized canonical message structures and real-time monitoring dashboards.

• As part of this integration project, 600+ interfaces were developed using various message types (EDI, IDocs, flat files and XML), SAP adapter and different connectivity protocols like FTP(s), http(s).
• Development of generic frameworks drastically reduced the effort required to build the interfaces and they were reused within the client’s portfolio.
• A single-view dashboard was developed using MashZone NextGen, webMethods and Oracle Database which enables easy monitoring of daily business processes (like purchase order generation and advanced shipment notifications) and integration infrastructure components (viz. scheduler, trigger, etc.) • Reduced compliance risk by having a common ERP platform.

Business impact

• Cost savings of $170 mn by standardizing the ERP business processes and removing redundancies in data.
• 30% effort reduction in interface development by using IDoc and flat file frameworks.
• 15% improvement in support turnaround time through single-view dashboard.
• Up to 25% optimization in application support resources of the acquired entities.
  

91¿ì»îÁÖ’s scalable & robust middleware design for the integration of ERP platforms brought in business processes optimization across the client’s manufacturing facilities. The client now has operating synergies intact with all the acquired entities.

Praveen Kollarkandi Head - B2B integration services 91¿ì»îÁÖ Limited