A global pharmaceutical and diagnostic company with an annual revenue of over USD 60bn embarked on a global transformation journey – together with us. Running the possibly World’s largest greenfield S/4 HANA initiative in the Pharma industry not only required novel ways of working but also hands-on leadership in view of a looming global pandemic.
The Client’s Agenda & Key Objectives
- Standardize end-to-end business processes and cut complexity across Group Finance, Group Procurement, Group Technical Operations and Sales Affiliates across 100 countries.
- Leverage a global template approach based on best practice
- Migrate to S/4 HANA based on a greenfield approach
Our Roles & Responsibilities
- Manage Global Template Design Project
- Lead and contribute business process expertise in functional areas: Sales & Distribution, Production Planning, Warehouse Management
- Run integrated program reporting
- Test management and methodology execution leadership
- Functional area leads and team members in sales, production, planning, and warehouse management.
- Analytics & Reporting (BI) and Master Data Management (MDM)
- Roll-out to various countries
Over the course of the journey 2 major service providers came and went. Avoras was consistently there to support and jump in during moments of crisis sharing hights and lows. Our ability to step in and lead as well as implement resulted in a highly trusted partnership through the program. Some of the roles Avoras led were:
Lessons Learned the Hard Way
User Requirements in SAP Solution Manager: Had to learn the hard way that Focus Build has limitations in user story management. In the middle of the design phase, took the decision to move all user stories into Smartsheet. Started the download of 16K stories at 8PM on a Thursday. Cursed SolMan by 1AM for taking so long. Entire extraction, transformation and load took till 4.30 AM. Was powered by Red Bull.
Only critical user requirements were mapped against test cases to save efforts. Prior to go-live, realized that we lacked transparency on the implemented requirements. Embarked on a true-up activity involving over 50 people to check every single requirement. Pretty sure the effort spent on the former would have been more welcome.
What is even less fun than being stabbed in the face? Being responsible for Program Reporting when a workstream realizes that they have missed a critical process.
The Hats We Wore
- Test Lead
- Methodology Lead for Industrialized Roll-outs
- Project Manager for the Global Template
- Business Product owner advisory
- Test Project Manager
- Integration Manager
- Quality Manager
- Reporting Manager
Our Methodology
Beeing around the block for many years has shown what works and what doesn’t and eventuelly led us to mold our experience into an own framework – PRISM. PRISM takes advantage of best practices and expert knowledge to deliver large and complex transformation projects based on a unique blend of agile methodology and ways of working, while leveraging a organisation’s preexisting toolset. Agile Ways of Working Implementing E2E processes with an agile mindset and successfully exploiting synergies between an E2E mindset and agile principles is a challenge that we have succeeded to overcome. We achieve this by employing a holistic approach to the integration of all technology, people, and process activities. This in turn reduces program risk and strengthens management controls.
This methodology helpes us to manage ongoing progress against initial plan, complete deliverables ahead of time with no compromise quality, to anticipated, identify and mitigate project risks in time and most important to achieve projects goals and even exceeding expectations.
- We improve business engagement by focusing on the adoption of industry best practices and minimize time to market
- We empower design quality and flexibility, bringing forward accurate project predictability.
- We conduct frequent health checks to assess expectations and perform early visualization.
- We enforce high transparency across teams which allows us to increase continuous improvement.
We take into consideration:
- Agile Mindset and new ways of working
- SAP Activate key-competences with SAFe principles
- Pharmaceutical & Life Sciences expert industry knowledge
« Applying agile methods to large-scale business transformation programs in validated system environments is no plug and play. »
Key Benefits for our Clients
Applying agile methods to large-scale business transformation programs in validated system environments is no plug and play. »We improve business engagement by focusing on the adoption of industry best practices and minimize time to market. We wer able to empower design quality and flexibility, bringing forward accurate project predictability. To assess expectations and perform early visualization we conduct frequent health checks. We could enabled high transparency across teams which allow us to increase continuous improvement.
