In: CHEManager 6/2015
Pharmacy and IT have more in common than you think: composition and dosage must be right, unexpected side effects should be avoided. Vitality and resilience are the goal. Finally, the highest quality standards apply. The Schwabe Group of Companies has ordered a fresh cell treatment for its controlling processes, more precisely for production controlling. An expert view from outside, which optimally combines IT and processes with business administration and industry requirements, has helped.
Ginkgo and hawthorn, St. John's wort and horse chestnut, stinging nettle and valerian: The Schwabe Group has been relying on the healing properties of plants for almost 150 years. Founded by the pharmacist dr. Willmar Schwabe is the Karlsruhe-based family business, today a leader in the phytos business, and produces pharmacy-only medicines for the treatment of memory problems, heart failure, urgency, depressive moods, venous insufficiency or colds. Overall, the phyto and homeopathy market is extremely heterogeneous internationally - and the challenges are increasing. Medicines or dietary supplements? Prescription, pharmacy-only, "Over the Counter" (OTC)? Some German OTC products are prescriptive in other countries with the same composition, in China even available only in hospitals, in the US, however, in drugstores. Schwabe tries to achieve the highest possible regulatory standard in every country. Incidentally, the requirements for studies and pharmaceutical documentation for phytopharmaceuticals are the same as for synthetic drugs. But not only different legal requirements as well as regulatory approval and monitoring procedures provide considerable effort. The provision of high-quality plant extracts and raw materials is also becoming increasingly difficult because of increasing environmental problems.
International - but manually
Schwabe pursues a special quality strategy in the extraction of plant extracts: everything in one hand - and all in-house. The plants are grown, for example, in the south of France, the USA, China or Eastern Europe in their own cultivation plan or by contract farmers. The respective plant extracts are then produced at the three sites in Karlsruhe, Ireland and Switzerland. This ultimately results in the finished products at various locations worldwide.
Schwabe generates two-thirds of its sales abroad. The international activity is to be further strengthened, primarily with structural adjustments and process optimisations - for the bundling of forces and for more flexibility. A key step in the recent past has been the merger of the subsidiary Spitzner with the parent company, resulted in a common SAP system. But a key project in the field of controlling will also make an important contribution to sustainability. After all, the manufacturing companies within the Schwabe Group combined a wide variety of production figures in different system platforms, sometimes even by hand, to evaluate them differently. In the long run too heterogeneous and time-consuming process that should be automated.
Uniform and clear
In terms of overall business management, working capital should be optimized and liquidity increased. In addition, the company needed a closer look at equipment utilization and setup time shares to increase output and reduce production costs. A remedy to the confused previous approach was to create a harmonized production controlling within the Schwabe Group, which provides the upper management with a new control cockpit. At the heart of this is the development of a Group-wide uniform and SAP-based production code system to be able to compare "like with like". Success factors: a tailor-made solution and a well-blended project team of internal and external forces. "You get what you measure" - this principle is familiar to all controllers. And so, once again, it was important to identify the key figures needed within the Schwabe Group for control purposes. Further key questions at the start of the project: From which data sources can these production key figures be derived according to which rules and in which periodicity? Which functional adjustments or extensions are required to make missing production key figures available in the SAP ERP environment? And how can this be implemented in the SAP Business Warehouse? At the end of the first project phase in May 2013, at least a part could already be answered here. For example, the technical concept worked out by the project team included the desired uniform key figure definitions - for example, set-up times (machine, personnel), disruption times / fault codes, non-job-related personnel times, personnel and machine capacity, capacity utilization and order costs.
In the subsequent blueprint phase, which was completed in February 2014, everything revolved around the definition of technical implementation. Components included the logistic data model in SAP ERP, the data flow from SAP ERP to SAP Business Warehouse and SAP Business Objects, and a prioritized implementation plan for the various production areas or key figures. For this purpose, the production areas of the parent company were considered - including the merged former subsidiary Spitzner Arzneimittel, today the Ettlingen branch - as well as the divisions German Homeopathy Union and Schwabe Extracta. Following the successful completion of the blueprint, the actual implementation phase has been running since the beginning of 2014 with the step-by-step technical implementation of the prioritized key figures: area-related and initially starting with sales forecast accuracy, inventory key figures, order costs in the assembly.
Central to the future
Even before the project ended, the conclusion was that the migration was worthwhile. For the entire group of companies. Because only for the parent company, effort and investment would not have counted. The project team has taken the hurdles that a project of this magnitude and complexity always brings with it, taken the pressure of deadlines in addition to the current operation defied and delivered "in time". Not only heterogeneous process and IT landscapes, but also heterogeneous business interests and different people could be reconciled. Important prerequisites: A professional and trusting cooperation between internal and external forces - and a holistic consulting approach that optimally linked IT, processes, business administration and industry requirements.
The Schwabe Group now has a basis for reporting production metrics, centrally located on the strategic platform SAP Business Warehouse. In the future, the term 'key figure' will be understood by all employees worldwide as the same. This sets the right course for future corporate actions.