In life sciences and healthcare, SAP shares with our customers and partners the overarching goals of improving individual lives and, more broadly, advancing medical science for better human health. SAP’s industry cloud is playing an increasingly crucial role in the pursuit of both.
While SAP develops its own industry cloud solutions, we rely on our partners’ deep domain of expertise to satisfy highly specialized, continually evolving customer needs. Our job boils down to maximizing the value our customers derive from doing business with SAP and our many partners. That value now depends on the shared successes that emerge from innovating and collaborating with our SAP partner community that increasingly revolves around industry cloud.
Life Sciences Anchors
In life sciences, we aim to harness SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) and industry cloud solutions to bring customers tailored, end-to-end suites built from components cultivated in the industry’s finest ecosystem. SAP’s deep expertise in life sciences has positioned us to deliver anchor solutions in four areas: clinical trials, manufacturing supply chain, batch release, and cell and gene therapy. But we’re not doing it alone.
We’re working closely with software and service partners in developing these core solutions and, more importantly, with consortia of customers whose needs, insights, and best practices become embedded in what we believe will become industry-standard products.
Even in areas in which SAP develops its own solutions, white spaces remain and those can represent golden opportunities for partners and customers alike. Here are three examples: Raumedic turned to p36’s UDI platform to ensure compliance with European Medical Device Regulation; Roche worked with Tenthpin and SAP to reshape clinical trial supply chain operations; and Klosterfau implemented Gramont’s Polaris Product Information Management to achieve Identification of Medicinal Products (IDMP) compliance.
While solutions addressing specific industry pain points like these are an industry cloud staple, our partners are delivering value to our customers in other ways, too, as Merck did in choosing BlueBoot accelerators to quickly implement and upgrade its plant maintenance user experience.
Our SAP and partner solutions for the life science industry continue to proliferate by the day. We are dedicated to offering the best of what SAP and its partners can bring to bear for our customers.
Open Healthcare Ecosystem
SAP is working to build a similar ecosystem for healthcare providers, delivering a modular healthcare system landscape of the future. The focus is to bring new, innovative healthcare business process capabilities in the areas of patient management, accounting, analytics, digital supply chain, and sourcing and procurement. This is a nascent effort, and one that’s advancing behind the idea of providing an open ecosystem and then giving partners the opportunity to lead in their areas of expertise.
To achieve this, working with hospital information system (HIS) providers is key. This is to foster integration between HIS and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions in accordance with healthcare-specific electronic medical record (EMR) regulations. The reality is EMR regulatory requirements and functional demands differ by local market. It just makes sense to give a diversity of EMR and other healthcare solution providers the keys to an open platform based on SAP Business Technology Platform and the HL7® FHIR® healthcare data interoperability standards. This approach helps ensure the needed flexibility to give healthcare providers business process capabilities tailored to their individual and local market needs.
Our healthcare partners have embraced this approach. Several partners already did announcements to leverage this open ecosystem to benefit their – our – healthcare customers.
Life sciences and healthcare are very different industries with shared goals: preserving and improving human health. In both industries, our partners are essential to the success of our shared offerings and I’m thrilled by the enthusiasm I’m seeing from our partners. There’s no doubt that the combination of their industry-specific cloud offerings and the robustness and flexibility of SAP Business Technology Platform can provide extraordinary value to our life sciences and healthcare customers for many years to come.
Markus von Quast is global head of Life Sciences Ecosystem at SAP.
