Wockhardt Branches Integrated by In-house IT Team

The global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, Wockhardt, earns more than 65 percent of its revenue from Europe and the United States. While their operations in India were remarkably successful, a need was felt to restructure the business by integrating Wockhardt USA, Wockhardt EU operations with Wockhardt in India.

Highlights

-- Integrating multiple countries with the external heterogeneous systems required new age technologies to facilitate robust connectivity.

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The global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, Wockhardt, earns more than 65 percent of its revenue from Europe and the United States. While their operations in India were remarkably successful, a need was felt to restructure the business by integrating Wockhardt USA, Wockhardt EU operations with Wockhardt in India.

Highlights

-- Integrating multiple countries with the external heterogeneous systems required new age technologies to facilitate robust connectivity.

-- The implementation brought in a net saving of Rs 20 crore (US$4.3 million) per annum and is dependant directly on sales growth.

The erstwhile business process had a distributed approach and many processes were duplicated resulting in little business clarity. "We were looking for a business integration model that would bring not only process concentration and centralization but also a huge net saving," explains Suresh Shenoy, sr. VP, Wockhardt.

The answer was integrating the flow of products, sales, inventory information. Reports were fine tuned and re-engineered to bring greater efficiency.

But bridging three continents wasn't easy. Integrating multiple countries with the external heterogeneous systems required new age technologies to facilitate robust connectivity.

If that wasn't daunting enough, change management was another problem area. Shenoy had to move employees from a people-centric process to a system centric process. "We convinced people how this would enrich their profiles," he says. The project was implemented by an in-house team of IT experts, with a strong knowledge of the business and best practices of Wockhardt.

In a record time of four months, Wockhardt successfully integrated their US, EU and Indian operations using SAP and went live in March 2009.

The implementation brought in a net saving of Rs 20 crore per annum and is dependant directly on sales growth. Qualitatively, the systems are better aligned and bottlenecks in the flow of materials and information have been removed.

The project enabled Wockhardt to successfully integrate four legal entities (two in the US, one in Switzerland and one in India) along with third party logistics. With disparate systems, turnaround time for each process used to be one to two days. This has now come down to a couple of hours.

"Manpower has been reduced and customer service and delivery has improved. MIS reports available across the globe have brought in a lot of business clarity and insight," says Shenoy.