Teru­mo, a $6 bil­lion med­ical device com­pa­ny head­quar­tered in Tokyo, announced that its sub­sidiary, Teru­mo Amer­i­c­as Hold­ing (TAH), under­went a dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion by imple­ment­ing SAP S/4HANA and sev­er­al oth­er SAP solu­tions. Forced to tem­porar­i­ly pull the plug due to COVID-19, the Amer­i­c­as busi­ness had a suc­cess­ful go-live in July of 2020. 

Although the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion pro­gram is a glob­al project, ASUG sat down with the three indi­vid­u­als respon­si­ble for the TAH pro­gram, which employs more than 8,000 peo­ple through­out loca­tions in the U.S., Latin Amer­i­ca, and Cana­da. The goal, in addi­tion to sim­pli­fy­ing process­es and mod­ern­iz­ing the infra­struc­ture, was to ulti­mate­ly have a sin­gle instance of an ERP that can help gain insights and dri­ve busi­ness in the age of disruption. 

In part one of this two-part series, Kalyan Bal­sub­ra­man­ian, CIO for all the Amer­i­c­as, Sung Yang, VP and dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project exec­u­tive, and Rick Lar­rieu, VP of glob­al IT and infra­struc­ture, dis­cussed the scope of the project, build­ing the busi­ness case, nav­i­gat­ing the imple­men­ta­tion process, and going live. In part two, we’ll go into more detail about the ben­e­fits of mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, exe­cut­ing on a well-thought-out change man­age­ment strat­e­gy, and doing so dur­ing a pandemic. 

ASUG: Can you talk about Terumo’s dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion project from a high lev­el and explain the scope of the project?