Use SAP S/4HANA to Drive Value in Your Life Sciences Business

The Life Sciences industry is going through a period of revolutionary change. Businesses are dealing with the headwinds from geopolitical upheavals, pressure on drug pricing, skills shortages and other factors, while at the same time looking to grasp the opportunities created by innovations in Biotech, Medtech, and digital.

In this environment, it is critically important for Life Sciences companies to maximise process efficiency, and to leverage full value from their IT investments. Customer experience and scalability are key considerations, and this is leading businesses to review their existing systems models.

As McKinsey reported in April 2023 ‘most life sciences companies are experimenting with product and platform models that speed delivery of user-focused technology but struggle to truly scale.’

Many Life Sciences companies already run their core resource planning and management processes on SAP ERP. This blog explores how today’s SAP S/4 capabilities add value to the pharmaceutical industry, the steps that pharma businesses can take to maximise that value, and how NTT DATA Business Solution applies its systems and sector expertise to make that journey successful.

How SAP S/4HANA Adds Value  

Upgrading to SAP S/4HANA may not seem an obvious answer for Life Sciences businesses looking to improve their process efficiency. Enterprise platform upgrades are more often seen as being driven by end-of-support deadlines or IT investment cycles than by an opportunity to gain business advantage.

Yet SAP S/4HANA offers distinct business advantages over SAP ECC that directly enable more efficient pharmaceutical operations, in four key areas

User interface – While the SAP ERP user interface has been quite cumbersome in previous versions. SAP S/4HANA’s user interface offers a rich, easy-to-use interface that can increase process efficiency, providing the data to execute tasks more reliably, reducing risk and rework costs.

Integration – SAP S/4HANA uses standardised methods of integrating with other systems, SAP and non-SAP, lowering the burden of complex interfaces.

Standardisation makes interfaces easier to comprehend and implement, increasing agility in interfacing with different systems, reducing risk and the effort required to keep processes compliant and validated. With life sciences companies using a range of best of breed solutions in the cloud, this integration capability is becoming more and more important.

Analytics and insights – While previous SAP versions have been highly operationally capable, they haven’t been as strong at providing the analytics and insights that middle and higher management need to make decisions.

SAP S/4HANA changes this, offering the data-driven insight capabilities managers need. The whole organisation has access to quality analytics and insights, whether they’re working in manufacturing or in finance management.

Functional capabilities – SAP has been focusing on S/4HANA development since 2015. This has created a growing innovation gap between S/4HANA and ECC, so that S/4HANA is now functionally much richer than ECC.

SAP S/4HANA brings a powerful range of functional capabilities. For example, SAP S/4HANA Quality Management now has the functional capability to replace dedicated LIMS, saving costs and increasing efficiency, and SAP S/4HANA offers more functional support for sustainability initiatives.

The combination of the rich user interface and broad access to data-driven insights creates the hands-on capability and clarity that drives innovation in a life sciences company, innovation that can help it to realise the transformational benefits promised by Industry 4.0.

In just one example, SAP S/4HANA offers greatly improved visibility of the tasks involved in completing a process.  Visualisation of six tasks on a single screen can trigger thinking on the potential to consolidate or automate those tasks.

Realising SAP S/4HANA benefits for Life Sciences

Life Sciences businesses face unique challenges that can create inertia around delivering the benefits of upgrading to SAP S/4HANA. A pragmatic approach that recognises the dynamics and pressures of the sector can help tackle these challenges and enable them to realize its full value.

Life Sciences companies are, understandably, laser-focused on their products, from the complex and costly processes involved in bringing them to market, to keeping them current and competitive. Work on systems and processes may be deprioritised because of market and other business pressures, inertia around breaking established ways of using the system, or a purely technology driven approach to upgrades, such as dealing with ECC end of support in 2027.

SAP S/4HANA offers major business functional advantages over ECC. To unlock these business advantages, businesses need to get beyond the idea of a technological upgrade and understand S/4HANA’s potential in relation to what they are trying to achieve.

This understanding provides the foundation for a business-driven approach to implementation which moves in incremental steps, with each step aligned to delivering a specific business priority.

How NTT DATA Business Solutions Can Help 

NTT DATA Business Solutions offers unique value for Life Sciences businesses looking to maximise value from their SAP S/4HANA implementation.

Our combination of SAP, technical and pharmaceutical sector expertise has been proved in several major implementations worldwide which in turn have established NTT DATA Business Solutions’ unrivalled credibility as a trusted systems partner in the Life Sciences space.

Most important, NTT DATA Business Solutions is founded on a committed ‘one team’ philosophy, based on working closely with the customer throughout the systems lifecycle and being invested in their success, through use of our certified SAP Partner Package for Life Sciences.

For ECC to S/4 migrations, NTT DATA has a proven best practice approach, a certified partner package solution, and a conversion hub that that will migrate customers, particularly Life Sciences customers, in a risk-free approach.

What Next?

SAP S/4HANA delivers the business process efficiencies that Life Sciences businesses need to stay competitive in today’s challenging marketplace, and NTT DATA Business Solutions is committed to partnering with its pharmaceuticals customers to help them realise that value.

To find out more, reach out to us on LinkedIn

Chris Paddison

Ruud Nieuweboer

or visit our Life Sciences page