20 September 2009

Pharmaceuticals supplier PharmaZell integrated its global sites with a Microsoft-based enterprise resource planning solution.

PharmaZell is a material and service provider to the pharmaceutical industry with active pharmaceutical ingredient (API) production sites in Germany, Denmark and India and headquarters near Munich, Germany. The company was successfully spun off from Lubrizol in 2006 through a management buy-out. In June 2007 Pharmazell acquired from Sandoz a controlling stake in GEA Pharmaceutical located in Copenhagen, Denmark. GEA’s broad capabilities in finished dosage form development and experience in controlled substances complement the portfolio of services and products that Pharmazell offers to its customers.

PharmaZell operates cGMP sites in Chennai and Vizag in India, Copenhagen, Denmark and Raubling, Germany, with a total of about 550 employees. The combination of European and Indian sites generates flexibility in manufacturing capacities and attractive cost structures. To make full use of this flexibility in day-to-day business processes, PharmaZell operates a modern and coordinated IT environment.

PharmaZell bundles all processes in one single global platform built on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Following the firm’s establishment in 2006, the central financial accounting and materials management systems were introduced in Raubling, Germany, in record time, and in 2007 the project won the ‘manufacturing and supply chain’ category in the Microsoft Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Innovation Awards. The second major rollout phase focused on integrating all international locations and equipping these with Dynamics NAV.

“The financial accounting requirements in India are very complicated, which is why we decided to introduce a dedicated database based on Microsoft Dynamics NAV for the accounting system there while materials management is mapped on the central database,” says Detlef Belstler, head of IT at PharmaZell.

To ensure that documents flow smoothly and that value and material flows are always in harmony, PharmaZell opted for Yaveon ProE-SCM, the enhanced supply chain management and inter-company module. Seamlessly developed in Dynamics NAV, this add-on allows all necessary master and transaction data to be exchanged and clear rules for data changes and tracking to be observed.

Effective cooperation between the partners was critical to the fast and reliable introduction of the solution. While Yaveon developed the overall concept and took responsibility for those areas of the ERP solution subject to validation, the Indian Microsoft Dynamics Partner, All-e Technologies, oversaw implementation of the Indian regulations and requirements for financial accounting. Yaveon’s many years of experience with international rollouts ensured that project communication functioned perfectly, allowing the systems to go live both in time and on budget.

“We chose Yaveon as our implementation partner because it has the right industry focus and, as the audit we carried out locally confirmed, is able to act as a supplier for validated ERP solutions,” adds Belstler. “Another factor was that the Yaveon staff knew us and the ERP installation from the first project phase in Germany,”

PharmaZell is now in the convenient situation of having all business processes running on one common platform with Microsoft Dynamics NAV and the SQL server. “That facilitates maintenance, training and analyses across the continents,” comments Yaveon project manager Andreas Dorsch. This will allow existing capacities to be exploited to the full and production to be relocated as required without any friction losses. “It means we can achieve the cost benefits we had hoped for from our expansion to India,” says Belstler. “At the same time, we are improving our ability to keep customers satisfied and expand our service portfolio.”

The project illustrates that, in order to realise synergies and benefits, a good business strategy needs to be supported by a sophisticated IT landscape and partners that are able to deliver industry experience from international projects.

This article first appeared In the 2009/10 edition of the Prime Partner Guide

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