A pharma company accelerates digital transformation by moving ERP processes to cloud
Client background
Client: World leader in addiction treatment with over 20 years of experience and 70-80% market share in opiod medications
Industry type: Specialty pharmaceuticals business
Area of operation: Global
Challenges
The pharma industry faces some unique challenges. Getting new drugs to market is often a complicated and expensive process with chances of getting a drug to market reportedly being around one in five thousand. Additionally, the industry has to cope with extensive regulations and is risk averse when it comes to nearly every aspect of business, including IT infrastructure.
The client was facing a challenge to build their entire IT stack from ground up in less than two years. The new tech stack also needed to streamline the R&D submission process to attain greater customer satisfaction, and get the client running as a totally separate, scalable entity within two years. Specific needs/objectives that the client wanted to address included:
- Migration to the cloud to reduce capital and operating expenses
- Flexibility in provisioning of servers for projects and test cycles
- Scalability and standardization of IT processes
The leading addiction treatment pharmaceutical company managed to bring down cost and achieve flexibility and standardization by migrating its on-premise SAP ERP to AWS Cloud
Solution
To stay on budget and on time, the decision was made to run the company entirely on the cloud — a first in the pharmaceutical industry. The client selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as their primary cloud platform.
The client had a few limited applications in a small data center and a handful of pharma/medical legacy applications on private cloud. But realizing the cost-effectiveness of the cloud solution, it migrated everything to AWS.
O2 Technologies has helped the client to separate multiple applications and data from legacy systems, set up a global IT function across multiple countries and implement new governance processes to ensure that the strategy is successful. The solution was implemented across three business units, manufacturing, commercial and TechOps.
O2 Technologies is helping the client to run its ERP application on cloud and is able to bring in agility in testing new drugs and customer behavior.
Business impact
The project was completed under budget and full five months ahead of schedule. The client has grown in size by 40% post migration to cloud without any disruptions in the IT landscape – a true test of an agile organization.
- The company became the first pharmaceutical company to have their entire IT infrastructure on the cloud.
- Reduction of operating expenses by 40%
- Reduction of database to manageable 600 GB which has helped to reduce infra foot print and improve application performance