Laboritorios B Braun finds a global answer to pharmaceuticals sales with SAP

Overview

• The Challenge
Enable global production and sales of pharmaceuticals and comply with strict local validation requirements; Generate supply chain efficiencies from a worldwide network of production plants; Reform business processes based on an aging, failing IT infrastructure

• The Solution
Industry: Pharmaceuticals
Application: SAP® R/3®
Hardware: IBM ^ ® pSeries®
Services: IBM Business Consulting
Services (BCS)

• The Benefits
The ability to conform to US FDA system validation and CE mark validation regardless of location, opening new sales opportunities; More efficient use of existing stock
and manufacturing through better information visibility; Revised, modernized business processes based on a flexible, adaptable, reliable infrastructure

Laboratórios B Braun in São Gonçalo, Brazil, is part of the global B Braun pharmaceutical and health business. The B Braun group has headquarters in Melsungen, Germany, with worldwide sales of more than € 2.5 billion, 75 % of which are generated by international operations. This privately owned company employs around 28,000 people, and has manufacturing plants on every continent. The healthcare market is truly global, highly competitive, and heavily regulated, country by country. The most significant national regulator is the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA); without FDA approval, drugs may not be sold to the US market. B Braun needed to find a way to satisfy FDA regulators even where the drug production was non-US based. At the same time, B Braun wanted to shift production or ship goods from the most economical location, to offer best price and service to customers, and the challenge was to reconcile global manufacturing with local regulation.

The healthcare market is truly global, highly competitive, and heavily regulated, country by country. The most significant national regulator is the US Federal Drug Administration (FDA); without FDA approval, drugs may not be sold to the US market. B Braun needed to find a way to satisfy FDA regulators even where the drug production was non-US based.

At the same time, B Braun wanted to shift production or ship goods from the most economical location, to offer best price and service to customers, and the challenge was to reconcile global manufacturing with local regulation.

Strict drug regimen:
Marcos Mazarin, Chief Information Officer in Laboratórios B Braun, Brazil, explains, “The FDA needs to know that audited processes have been followed. With different systems at different locations, each would require separate FDA and CE mark (European) compliance before we could ship product. In addition, sharing information between locations was difficult, preventing management from gaining production efficiencies and improve the business.”

Head office management selected SAP as the strategic ERP solution, now operational at the headquarters in Germany and Malaysia, and being implemented in Brazil, Slovakia, Spain and US, with others on the way. “For Brazil, SAP is a critical success factor,” says Marcos Mazarin, “Our previous solution was highly customized and very difficult to maintain, which put the business at risk should it fail. We experienced outages of up to eight hours, and the vendor was struggling to solve the problems. We could not upgrade the operating systems or hardware, because we had no way of predicting the impact on the system: we were in an IT infrastructure deadend, frozen since 1995.”

Choosing the best SAP physician:
Marcos Mazarin was part of an international committee that invited a number of companies to assist with the B Braun Laboratórios worldwide SAP implementation: key criteria were a track record of global, multi-site implementation; depth of SAP knowledge and resource, and industry experience. "IBM Business Consulting Services were clear leaders; they demonstrated very good SAP knowledge with great references, and offered a highly attractive price. Combined with the ability to manage roll-out in several countries at one time, IBM was the best choice for B Braun," says Marcos Mazarin.

Laboratórios B Braun is using the SAP implementation to optimize its business processes, too, as these have to some extent been locked into the former ERP system. IBM Business Consulting Services is intimately involved in this revision, a key advantage in assisting B Braun maximise the benefits of SAP.

High-quality solution:
The SAP system is hosted on three IBM ^ pSeries 630, configured as a High Availability Cluster Multiprocessing (HACMP) to deliver high availability in the German data
center, with a high-speed T1 link to Brazil. A total of twelve SAP solution components are being implemented at Laboratórios B Braun, including Financials, Materials Management, Production Planning, Sales and Distribution, Warehouse Management and Quality Management, supporting around 500 users.

Laboratórios B Braun’s SAP system will allow it to address three key issues: international FDA and CE mark validation, supply chain performance, and global information management.

“Quality Management is in some ways the core piece for us,” comments Marcos Mazarin. “Using SAP we implement a standard validation process for the system, and it is this “IBM Business Consulting Services have been superb in their assistance. With their support B Braun expects to be fully exploiting the benefits of the
SAP solutions as the worldwide rollout continues,” concludes Marcos Mazarin.

“Now validation is not a problem, we can sell worldwide regardless of the originating B Braun location. Sharing production and stock level information globally therefore becomes more important, since we can now meet a customer’s requirements from any location that has the validated SAP system. It is essential that real-time data is easily and efficiently available at all times, and the SAP solution implemented by IBM gives us this essential business advantage. This integrated view opens up new sales
opportunities, as well as providing cost-savings for the group.”

Looking to future developments.

While the SAP system is hosted in the German data center, part of the system management is managed by the Brazilian location. Future development, such as mySAP® Business Intelligence and mySAP Customer Relationship Management, will be implemented locally, according to global B Braun standards, and hosted remotely. All
Laboratórios B Braun Brazil SAP instances are hosted in Germany, data is shared and stored on Oracle® databases.

Achieving robust, long-lived health.

The B Braun team is clear that it is the cost-saving and efficiency benefits that drive the use of the SAP solutions, and IBM Business Consulting Services has been instrumental in achieving B Braun’s corporate SAP goals. “Once you have a global information system, supply chain management becomes a reality. You can inspect stock levels at subsidiaries in real time, place orders and maximize sales and production efficiencies.”

“IBM Business Consulting Services have been superb in their assistance. With their support B Braun expects to be fully exploiting the benefits of the SAP solutions as the worldwide rollout continues,” concludes Marcos Mazarin.

Further Information
To learn more about how the IBM and
SAP alliance can help your business,
please visit: ibm-sap.com

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