ERP at a pharma company

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: The pharma industry operates in a specialised environment where requirements are unique. To meet the needs of a pharma company, an ERP package has to be highly customisable. Kemwell is a pharma that does contract manufacturing for majors such as Johnson & Johnson, Himalaya, AstraZeneca and GSK. It has two manufacturing plants. The company has been in this field for more than 25 years now, and its turnover was Rs 30 crore in fiscal 2003-04.

This doubled to Rs 60 crore for the year ending March 2005. Home-grown system not good enough Kemwell had been using a customised ERP system based on FoxPro that was developed in-house. There were many limitations that the company had to grope with, including the chances of data corruption in case of power failure.

There were also limitations with regard to how many tables and indexes could be created. Says M C Nanaiah, the company’s General Manager for Systems & Processes, “Since the system was based on DOS, modifying reports was tedious because even for making small reports one had to write programmes-a time-consuming affair. In addition, the package was not integrated with the system running at the other manufacturing plant.”

Bringing the system online entailed setting up a separate leased link as the in-house system was a bandwidth hog. Besides this, the home-grown system had a limited set of modules such as finance, inventory, quality, purchase and payroll.

mySAP selected

After Kemwell decided to go in for an ERP package, it picked mySAP. Explains Subhash Bagaria, Kemwell’s Managing Director, “A standardised package requires a large investment. We needed a solution which would gel with our systems and was customisable.”

The choice of mySAP did not come easily as many packages were evaluated before they decided on mySAP. Nanaiah says, “We evaluated packages from vendors like JD Edwards and Oracle. I personally went and researched a number of ERP installations at different companies, and found mySAP to be the best as far as meeting our requirements was concerned.”

Kemwell representatives saw the successful running of SAP ERP at companies such as Balsara Home Products, Dystar India and Bilag Industries. Nanaiah adds, “mySAP has a proven track record in the pharma industry, and complies with good manufacturing practice. It is also compliant with the US Food & Drug Administration standards.”

Challenging transition