Global Life Sciences Organization

Challenge

An international life sciences company of over 10,000 employees, sought to modernize their enterprise architecture through the transformation of their master data repository, SAP MDG, and a consolidation of multiple legacy ERPs to a new central SAP S/4HANA implementation.

The program was driven by a number of strategic drivers: regulatory compliance in a heavily regulated industry and the desire to centralize IT to improve business processes and data quality. It was a wholesale program with departments throughout the organization targeted for transformation including legal/contracts, procurement, quality control, finance, and supply chain/production. It was decided a cloud-based Data Migration solution would need to be built to support new highly complex business processes and to incorporate the largely customized supply chain and manufacturing legacy ERPs.

The previous data migration approach encountered serious challenges, so the organization contacted data migration experts, Syniti. During the assessment and re-planning phase, Syniti provided a revamped roadmap to show how the project outcome could be achieved while heavily mitigating potential risks and project over-runs.

Solution

Syniti deployed the Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP) for the digital transformation. Syniti owned and executed the migration of multiple legacy systems of 100+ objects to the new S/4HANA implementation, as well as the harmonization of all data in the SAP MDG system, including data for processes like Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, and Production Planning.

The transition to Syniti as the data partner occurred after the deployment of master data had begun.  As a result Syniti’s strategy to keep master data current included a series of additional delta loads and dual maintenance activities, ensuring day-to-day operations were not interrupted.

Business process redesign was required to support best practices installation and the smooth transition of closing out legacy processes, and extensive pre-load business- and technical-readiness checks were installed to ensure only pristine data was loaded to S/4HANA.

Finally, Syniti enabled a central data catalog on the SKP.  This allowed data knowledge and logic to be captured and re-used across other areas of the transformation, and ultimately for all future data initiatives.

Outcome

The organization successfully went live with MDG and S/4HANA well within their aggressive timeframe. The organization cited the power of the incredible partnership with Syniti for the swift deployment of Syniti’s best-practice migration methodology.

In under a year, the Syniti team successfully processed 225+ data loads using the SKP, migrating over 35m records and 100+ transactional objects prior to the cutover.  With compliance a key factor for the organization, audited and validated processes acceptable to life science regulations and the organization’s quality control standards were successfully implemented, providing a sound backbone for future regulatory management.