Case study

Tailored Solution in SAP ERP Transformation Program

Life Sciences & Healthcare, PMO & Project Delivery

Our client, a global Biotechnology company, embarked on a $100 million multi-year SAP ERP transformation journey to enable their portfolio expansion and drive top-line products to achieve $5B in annual revenue. This program is an organizational-level effort with more than 700 program team members working together globally to standardize and simplify business processes. They wanted to turn previously siloed systems and complex manual processes into an automated digital platform with SAP at its core as well as establish a solid data foundation for “One Source of Truth”.

MIGSO-PCUBED (MP) was brought on board to provide our expertise in project management and business & data analytics to resolve multiple challenges the client team faced during their strategic ERP transformation program.

The challenge

To deliver this transformation program, the MP team needed to navigate the following key challenges:

Tight schedule and complex dependencies
Siloed information and global coordination

Tight schedules and complex dependencies

Achieving our client’s strategic goals meant delivering the project under tight time constraints. To meet their timeline, our team needed to ensure that we provided accurate information, frictionless collaboration, and smooth coordination.

Further complicating the project was the large number of dependencies of key deliverables. The complication comes from various sources, including:

logical dependencies among multiple business processes,
FTE resource-based dependencies,
internal in-flight project dependencies, and
external license & compliance dependencies.

Each of these dependencies needed to be considered when building out the schedule.

Siloed information and global coordination

In the client’s current working environment, data was stored and maintained on multiple platforms in different formats. With these siloed systems requiring many manual processes, more time than planned was spent on documentation, data collection & review, and data format normalization before any data migration activities could be completed.

In addition, the more than 700 team members participating in this program are located across multiple countries and time zones. Most of them are not fully allocated to support this program, so limited resource availability caused additional challenges in coordinating meetings, collecting data, and completing tasks on time.

While facing these initial challenges, the MP team also identified knowledge gaps between the vendor SAP implementation team and the client, in terms of their organizational culture and history, ways of working, naming conventions, and methodologies. This led to unexpected and unnecessary time lost in communication and coordination.

The solution

To address these challenges, MIGSO-PCUBED assembled a team consisting of project management consultants, business analytics consultants, data analytics consultants, and a Delivery Manager.

Deliver high-quality services from day one

Thanks to many years of successful collaboration between this client and MP, our team already had a comprehensive knowledge base about their processes and ways of working. After the team completed the client’s internal onboarding, MP organized another, deeper-level training with more detailed guidance on the client’s organizational culture, business processes, regulation & compliance requirements, and the tools to ensure the consultants deliver high-quality services from the start of the project.

Streamline PMO working processes and improve communication

The SAP program PMO became the center of communication and coordination. Utilizing the PMO mailbox and PMO calendar, MP organized meetings across multiple time zones, consolidated and disseminated the right information at the right time, and proactively worked with the vendor’s PMO office.

MP also improved the SAP program PMO performance with process optimization in resource planning, new resources onboarding, integration planning, Jira hierarchy organization, and auditing.

Manage the data migration and resolve defects in time

MP provided dedicated data services to work with the client’s Enterprise Data team, focused on:

SAP master data validation,
Data compiling and cleaning,
Reviewing and updating the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for SAP master data,
Defect tracking,
Measuring and management, and
Setting up and iterating the risk management dashboard in PowerBI.

In addition to following the tight timeline, we proactively coordinated meetings with the client, vendor, and SAP team to resolve defects and issues. We also actively followed up with key stakeholders to sign off on data objects and approval defects in their Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) tool on time.

Manage the SOP changes and their change control process

To address changes in their Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) caused by system and data migration to SAP, our team worked with the core team members to prepare Change Control Board meetings. MP facilitated these meetings and managed the change control process. We prepared an application interface architecture flow diagram in Visio and identified any changes and gaps in the SOPs. In addition, we helped the client onboard tech writers and organized them to revise the SOPs to reflect the latest schedule changes.

The outcome

In less than nine months of the engagement’s kick-off, MP helped the client to successfully meet their project milestones on time by:

Validating the accuracy of 16,000+ data records,
Adding missing data to 2,750 materials and manufacturing information,
Consolidating and migrating 500+ Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) documents, both GxP and Non-GxP included,
Improving the quality of data derived from 300 Jira tasks,
Aggregating data from 190 vendors across 20+ countries,
Producing 40+ training requirements,
Updating 30 Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) documents, and
Validating 5 Boundary Application integrations.

In addition, we helped the SAP program PMO successfully act as a single point of coordination for global teams across America, Europe, and Asia. We organized 8+ monthly on-site global team events for schedule release, key tasks assignment, and team building as well as acted as a coordination and mediation center for risk, issues, and conflict resolution.

This engagement is still ongoing, and our teams continue to collaborate to ensure the success of this large-scale transformation program. This engagement builds on the long-standing partnership between MP and our client. Through our partnership, the client’s multi-year organizational SAP program is on track to contribute toward its goal of $5B in annual revenue. As we continue our efforts on this SAP program and across their organization, we look forward to innovating solutions to address future challenges, helping the client achieve their strategic goals and realize substantial business value.

Thank you Elizabeth Peiwen Li for contributing to this article.