If there are any indus­tries that have expe­ri­enced extreme pres­sures as a result of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, it’s the orga­ni­za­tions oper­at­ing in the life sci­ences and health care space. While health care orga­ni­za­tions con­tin­ue to hold down the front lines — car­ing not only for patients with the virus, but also those with oth­er con­di­tions — many life sci­ences com­pa­nies are run­ning at peak capac­i­ty to deliv­er tests, ther­a­peu­tic treat­ments, and ulti­mate­ly a COVID-19 vaccine. 

Behind the front lines, there are tech­nol­o­gists and SAP experts work­ing to make sure the essen­tial tech­nol­o­gy infra­struc­ture con­tin­ues to run to sup­port these vital activ­i­ties. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the life sci­ences and health care indus­tries came togeth­er to share their sto­ries at ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Indus­tries, our vir­tu­al expe­ri­ence on Sept. 21 – 25. Emcee Kaela Alt­man of ASUG described our guests as, ​“the pro­fes­sion­als who are on the front lines fight­ing the virus, whether they are the first respon­ders, the sci­en­tists work­ing on treat­ment plans, or the soft­ware archi­tects work­ing to keep SAP sys­tems work­ing at peak efficiency.”

Rethink­ing the Health Care and Life Sci­ences Sup­ply Chain

Giv­en the events of 2020 and the short­age of per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment (PPE) that hit both indus­tries, it’s no sur­prise that the sup­ply chain was a major top­ic of dis­cus­sion. Sev­er­al pre­sen­ters described how frag­ment­ed the sup­ply chain can be in these indus­tries. By the time the pan­dem­ic made its way from Chi­na, to Europe, and then to the Amer­i­c­as, Chi­na had already restrict­ed the export of the PPE it pro­duced, forc­ing health care and life sci­ences orga­ni­za­tions to find oth­er sources — even man­u­fac­ture it them­selves, as we heard from a cus­tomer firsthand.

Here are the top three themes that sur­faced through our life sci­ences and health care sessions: 

1. Agili­ty and Resilience Are Key for Life Sci­ences and Health Care Organizations

These indus­tries are no strangers to per­sis­tence. As he was shar­ing some com­mon pain points that orga­ni­za­tions expe­ri­ence, Damon Braly, direc­tor of health care solu­tions at Pure Stor­age, remind­ed the audi­ence that only 12% of drug dis­cov­ery pro­grams suc­ceed. Yet the recent eco­nom­ic and mar­ket pres­sures have dialed up the need for orga­ni­za­tions to become more agile. 

SAP sees itself as a key part­ner in deliv­er­ing tech­nol­o­gy to help these cus­tomers achieve this, as we heard in the open­ing keynote with Geoff Scott, ASUG CEO. Lloyd Adams, SVP and man­ag­ing direc­tor for the east region of SAP, described how excit­ed SAP is to be able to bring to life an end-to-end port­fo­lio for its life sci­ences and health care cus­tomers. ​“Now that many of our solu­tions are cloud-cen­tric, these imple­men­ta­tions no longer have to look like they did in the past,” Adams said. ​“You have the abil­i­ty to sprint and bring quick­er time to val­ue through a road map that is unique to your com­pa­ny. There is no one-size-fits-all. You can real­ly start any­where and go anywhere.”

Why Time Isn’t on Your Side

Man­dar Par­alkar, head of life sci­ences indus­try at SAP, echoed the inher­ent chal­lenges these busi­ness­es face and why speed is so impor­tant to the tech­nolo­gies they use. Drugs take a long time to man­u­fac­ture and mar­ket. By the time they are safe for use, com­pa­nies need to rely on data and soft­ware to man­u­fac­ture and dis­trib­ute them. Par­alkar men­tioned that he is see­ing an unusu­al amount of col­lab­o­ra­tion hap­pen­ing among phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies in order to get these impor­tant med­ica­tions to the patients who need them. 

Despite the chal­lenges they are expe­ri­enc­ing, Adams cau­tioned those com­pa­nies that are lean­ing toward slow­ing down or paus­ing in this mar­ket. ​“This whole notion of sit­ting on the side­lines — in any indus­try, but in par­tic­u­lar, life sci­ences — does not equate to resilience what­so­ev­er,” Adams said. He rein­forced that the pan­dem­ic has exposed oper­a­tional and sup­ply chain weak­ness­es for many com­pa­nies. But he sees their work to address these issues and strength­en them­selves for the next glob­al cri­sis as a sil­ver lin­ing. He advised cus­tomers, ​“Where you see pock­ets of this at your orga­ni­za­tion, expose it. Spend time think­ing about what you and oth­er lead­ers at your orga­ni­za­tion can do to be more pre­pared for the next macro­eco­nom­ic environment.” 

2. You Can Inno­vate With­out a Big-Bang Transformation

Two cus­tomers shared their jour­neys to SAP S/4HANA — Bris­tol-Mey­ers Squibb and Var­i­an. Bris­tol-Mey­ers Squibb decid­ed on a brown­field con­ver­sion to SAP S/4HANA from SAP ECC 6.0 while migrat­ing mul­ti­ple work­loads to Ama­zon Web Ser­vices. Var­i­an, on the oth­er hand, described how it built a busi­ness case and the land­scape archi­tec­ture to move from SAP S/4HANA 1709 to 1909. In both cas­es, the cus­tomers ben­e­fit­ted from their projects with­out hav­ing to invest end­less time and mon­ey to make these into big­ger trans­for­ma­tion projects.

Var­i­an, a glob­al leader in radi­a­tion oncol­o­gy, aimed to increase cus­tomer and employ­ee engage­ment, as well as its abil­i­ty to serve more cus­tomers by stream­lin­ing its ERP sys­tem. The main dri­vers for the busi­ness case were to sim­pli­fy busi­ness process­es, reduce TCO, improve the user expe­ri­ence, and take advan­tage of the embed­ded ana­lyt­ics in the new­er release to sup­port pre­dic­tive fea­tures. It also was look­ing to auto­mate more process­es. ​“We were look­ing for a three-fold pro­duc­tiv­i­ty increase,” said Naga Nal­la­iah, SAP tech­nol­o­gy man­ag­er at Var­i­an. The total busi­ness down­time for the project, includ­ing val­i­da­tion, was 24 hours. The project began in ear­ly March 2020 and was com­plete by mid-May. Nallaiah’s advice to oth­er cus­tomers? ​“Be resilient and ready to adapt.” 

When Time Is Mon­ey and Tech­ni­cal Debt

For Bris­tol-Mey­ers Squibb, the goal also was to keep its sys­tems as up to date as pos­si­ble — though it was the finan­cial penal­ty that came from wait­ing that drove this project. Michael Di Novi, head of dig­i­tal capa­bil­i­ty man­age­ment, ERP, said, ​“It was a mat­ter of when and not if we would move to SAP S/4HANA. We took a look at the costs of wait­ing and doing it right away. But we found by wait­ing longer, the tech­ni­cal debt we would cre­ate would be con­sid­er­able and sub­stan­tial and we’d have to redo that work again when we even­tu­al­ly moved to SAP S/4HANA. The finan­cial pro­file was con­sid­er­ably bet­ter to do it soon­er rather than lat­er.” This IT-led project was a brown­field con­ver­sion from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4HANA 1809. The com­pa­ny was able to com­plete the project on time, in under two years. 

3. Cre­ative Think­ing and Col­lab­o­ra­tion Make Things Happen

Two of the pre­sen­ters fea­tured sto­ries that were a direct exam­ple of why cre­ativ­i­ty and col­lab­o­ra­tion are need­ed to suc­ceed in this space today. Brooks Olphin of John­son & John­son shared his expe­ri­ences when intro­duc­ing a new process min­ing pro­gram across the enter­prise. Accord­ing to Olphin, a process and task min­ing man­ag­er who works in the company’s cen­ter of excel­lence, this was a sig­nif­i­cant change-man­age­ment exer­cise that ulti­mate­ly required the com­pa­ny to adjust its mind­set about process improve­ment projects. 

The year-and-a-half-long project at John­son & John­son began as a proof of con­cept using the Celo­nis plat­form to ana­lyze the order to cash sys­tem for points of fric­tion and inef­fi­cien­cy. ​“Our jour­ney began with us act­ing as a small start­up,” Olphin said. ​“We then real­ized we need­ed to put some guiderails in place for dif­fer­ent teams as we brought more users into the sys­tem. Now we fol­low a crawl, walk, run method­ol­o­gy where we’re able to start users small with some analy­sis and visu­al­iza­tions to grad­u­al­ly grow their skill sets.” The goal was to help users at John­son & John­son under­stand process min­ing con­cep­tu­al­ly, as well as how to use the tools avail­able to do this for the process­es they owned. 

From a Piece of the Puz­zle to the Holis­tic Process

Olphin rec­og­nized that John­son & Johnson’s long com­mit­ment to dif­fer­ent qual­i­ty pro­grams and method­olo­gies would be both help­ful and a chal­lenge. That was, in part, why his team estab­lished a cen­ter of excel­lence around process min­ing. ​“One of the biggest chal­lenges and the biggest ben­e­fits of process min­ing is that it brings peo­ple togeth­er and changes their mind­set from, ​‘this is my piece of the puz­zle and that’s all I care about’ to be able to see upstream and down­stream how your choic­es impact an over­all process,” he said. 

“We dis­cov­ered that process min­ing should not be just a one-and-done project,” Olphin said. ​“That has led us to cre­ate mul­ti­ple tem­plates that we’re able to con­nect with var­i­ous SAP sys­tems that have pre­built user per­sonas, user sto­ries, and dri­vers of how the busi­ness should be mov­ing for­ward.” John­son & John­son con­tin­ues to find tan­gi­ble ROI from its process min­ing pro­gram — for exam­ple, reduc­ing the order-entry-to-ship­ping cycle time from 13 days to four days while offer­ing more vis­i­bil­i­ty to the stake­hold­ers in the process. 

DIY Per­son­al Pro­tec­tive Equipment

Cre­ative think­ing and col­lab­o­ra­tion also helped Johns Hop­kins Health Ser­vices (JHHS) solve the crit­i­cal chal­lenge of a lack of PPE. In his pre­sen­ta­tion, ​“More than a Mask,” Sup­ply Chain Inven­to­ry Lead Max Mendez explained how the hos­pi­tal net­work made the deci­sion to man­u­fac­ture its own PPE. The organization’s path to that deci­sion involved a lit­tle bit of good for­tune and a lot of resourcefulness. 

The good for­tune came from the fact that the hos­pi­tal net­work had an 165,000 square-foot dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ter based in the Bal­ti­more area near five of its six hos­pi­tals. That facil­i­ty made it pos­si­ble to assem­ble PPE and dis­trib­ute it both local­ly and to ship to its sixth loca­tion in Flori­da. JHHS began by cre­at­ing pro­to­types of its own face shields. Once the design was approved by lead­er­ship and the clin­i­cal teams, it began to mass-pro­duce these. 

JHHS con­tin­ued to inno­vate by reach­ing out to local man­u­fac­tur­ers like Under Armour, which it teamed up with to cre­ate what it calls an ​“origa­mi mask.” JHHS cre­at­ed train­ing videos to teach vol­un­teers how to fold these into masks for the med­ical pro­fes­sion­als treat­ing patients on the front lines. By chance, a JHHS employ­ee heard from a rel­a­tive about how Ford Motor Com­pa­ny had begun man­u­fac­tur­ing reusable gowns from airbag mate­r­i­al. The team reached out to the com­pa­ny for sam­ples, which it then sent to its clin­i­cal teams for approval. That led JHHS to be able to deliv­er 60,000 gowns in one month, which were found through test­ing to pro­tect med­ical pro­fes­sion­als from con­t­a­m­i­na­tion far bet­ter than dis­pos­able gowns. 

Mendez explained that flex­i­bil­i­ty and inno­va­tion were both crit­i­cal to the suc­cess of this ini­tia­tive. ​“We need­ed to move quick­ly to keep these oper­a­tions run­ning,” he said. ​“See what part­ner­ships you can make local­ly.” JHHS not only col­lab­o­rat­ed with Under Armour and Ford, but also with local ven­dors and hos­pi­tal net­works. JHHS may have been new to man­u­fac­tur­ing, but it remained laser-focused on prod­uct qual­i­ty. ​“Even though we were man­u­fac­tur­ing these in-house, we always made sure the clin­i­cal mate­ri­als stayed safe so that our friends on the front lines were feel­ing safe.”

Watch all of the life sci­ences and health care ses­sions on demand, along with the rest of ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP for Industries.