ConvaTec beats business deadlines with help from SAP and IBM Global Business Services

ConvaTec specializes in wound, skin and stoma care, with a range of advanced single-use medical devices that are in use worldwide. Formerly a division of the Bristol-Myers Squibb company, ConvaTec is now independently owned by capital investors. The company employs some 8,000 people, operates eight principal manufacturing sites, with offices or representation in 90 countries.

ConvaTec medical devices was a small business within the much larger pharmaceuticals group. The company had little opportunity to ask its parent to tailor the existing SAP solutions to fit ConvaTec’s particular business needs. ConvaTec relied on Bristol-Myers Squibb for financial and administration services such as sales ledger, tax, payroll and treasury management.

When the sale was completed, the Transition Services Agreement (TSA) provided for an eighteen-month continuation of existing services.

William Compton, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at ConvaTec, explains, “Bristol-Myers Squibb sold ConvaTec in one of the biggest corporate divestitures in 2008, and yet we really hit the ground running by making a new corporate acquisition within just 30 days.

“This story is about the ability to implement a complete SAP software solution, with assistance from IBM, in our manufacturing plants and for all our customers in 90 countries.”

Select the best business partner
“The platform was always going to be SAP,” says William Compton. “Bristol-Myers Squibb operated a large shared service, and we had very good experience with the functionality and capabilities of SAP software. Our challenge was to find a partner that could deliver successfully within the TSA.”

From a shortlist of five possible partners, the proposal created by the IBM Global Business Services stood out by some distance.

“Based on our criteria, in which price featured heavily, the IBM Global Business Services differentiated itself through the quality of team,” says William Compton. “Additionally, IBM brings a whole stack of integrated technologies to support SAP, such as IBM DB2 and the server hardware. Having a single partner able to complete the infrastructure stack makes it much easier to move forward rapidly, and more cost-effective to manage.”

He adds, “The final component was the IBM go-to-market experience in the life sciences sector, with the IBM Life Sciences Express solution. The experience, templates and accelerators offered by IBM made a significant difference, increasing our confidence that we would be able to hit the TSA deadline.”

Beat the business deadline
ConvaTec went live with a complete suite of SAP solutions in two manufacturing plants and seven markets in one year, followed by a second wave of 35 additional markets and the remaining manufacturing sites four months later.

ConvaTec deployed a complete suite of SAP ERP software, using the IBM Life Sciences Express solution, a qualified SAP Business All-in-One solution, which includes pre-configured compliance, validation and training services. The solution supports 2,000 SAP users, approximately 25 percent of the ConvaTec workforce, from sales agents to shop-floor employees.

“We managed to deploy the core components without requiring major enhancements, and we were able to leverage the software itself to do business very quickly. By taking a standard SAP product with the value-added customizations and implementation from IBM Global Business Services, ConvaTec was able to go live in the first phase within 12 months,” says William Compton.

He adds, “None of the other potential suppliers had a tangible life-sciences model that was ready to deploy. With the IBM Life Sciences Express solution, implementation becomes a series of straightforward choices. Rather than asking about how you want the system to work, IBM Global Business Services encouraged the team to choose from preconfigured options. This is not theoretical, but real options based on solutions that work, and it is a highly effective way to move forward fast.”

Hosted solutions accelerate deployment
To further accelerate the process, ConvaTec chose to use the IBM Applications on Demand service. While ConvaTec owns the SAP software, IBM Global Business Services installs, configures and hosts the SAP applications for ConvaTec, with appropriate processing and data storage, available on a subscription model.

“IBM Global Business Services understood the pressing nature of our project, and said ‘We’ll host your SAP applications and cover that part of the landscape for you.’ IBM installed the applications and database, and the solution was ready to use on the IBM servers as a service, removing that workload from us,” says William Compton. Furthermore, IBM provides global integrated finance and accounting support to ConvaTec through the SAP solution from the IBM regional delivery center in Krakow, Poland and its global delivery center in Manila, The Philippines.

The ConvaTec SAP environment is made up of 17 servers comprising both production and non-production SAP applications. The 17 servers are actually virtual servers within four IBM Power Systems servers hosted by IBM, running IBM DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows. ConvaTec also runs additional IBM Power and IBM System x servers for non-SAP applications, also hosted within the IBM Managed Services Delivery Infrastructure.

Gain efficiency through insight
ConvaTec continues to grow its global portfolio, and where possible align their systems with the central SAP landscape. ConvaTec uses IBM WebSphere tools to extract, transform and load their data, and IBM Cognos for business analytics. For those businesses not migrated to the central SAP applications, ConvaTec uses WebSphere to integrate data dynamically into its core systems.

“IBM Cognos and WebSphere provide a full set of tools around the SAP platform that enable ConvaTec to deliver business value.”

Clean break for a bright future
ConvaTec has emerged from its status as a division of a pharmaceuticals giant into its own status as a standalone business in just 18 months, relying on SAP applications and IBM technologies and services to complete the transition. IBM Global Business Services has helped ConvaTec achieve clean separation from Bristol-Myers Squibb, with a model that supports the manufacturing, sales, and business process support required by ConvaTec.

By standardizing on SAP applications and leveraging IBM Life Sciences Express, ConvaTec benefits from a clearly defined view of costs throughout its business processes, supported by the globally extended outsourced model provided by IBM Global Business Services.

William Compton concludes, “We could not have done it without SAP and IBM. IBM Global Business Services are our integration partners, and engaging their services was one of our best business decisions. We love to talk about the success of ConvaTec, SAP and IBM, because it went well and we’re very proud of it.”