The pharmaceutical industry plays a critical role for global healthcare. It is a multi-billion-dollar industry, responsible for researching, developing, manufacturing, and distributing pharmaceutical products and services addressing a vast and diverse range of health challenges.
To ensure that patients globally receive required medications and treatment on time, the management of manufacturing and distribution must be ultra-efficient, agile, and responsive.
With patient safety on the line and high-quality expectations, there is no room for error.
One company that has mastered this balancing act is Ireland-based UniPhar, a high-growth, diversified healthcare services company that provides distribution services for pharmaceutical products. The company works closely with manufacturers to offer third-party logistics (3PL) and fourth-party logistics (4PL) services to remain true to its mission of securing patient access to pharmaceutical products.
In the last decade, UniPhar has witnessed unprecedented growth and today delivers pharmaceutical products to more than 160 countries.
SAP and UniPhar: A 15-Year Partnership
UniPhar has grown organically and through acquisitions, and during this time its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) landscape had become highly customized.
Two years ago, UniPhar’s board gave its Chief Enterprise Architect Piotr Wojdowski a mandate “to rework the company’s digital core” and deliver a digital transformation to unlock future growth while still safeguarding the highest of standards in the manufacturing and distribution chain.
In the quest to find a software partner for its digital transformation, Wojdowski says UniPhar needed “a partner and a software that is reliable and best in class” to strengthen and future-proof the company’s ability to deliver on its mission of securing patient access to pharmaceutical products.
Wojdowski explains that there is an element of social responsibility to UniPhar’s mission. The patient requiring the pharmaceutical products or services “could be somebody’s relatives, it could be somebody’s mother, or it could be somebody’s son,” making it even more important that the selected digital transformation software and partner was not only best in class but also reliable and trustworthy.
“Not only had SAP proved itself to be a trusted and reliable partner for UniPhar for 15 years,” Wojdowski explains, but SAP “is a standard in the health services sector, making integration of other services easier.”
SAP Advances UniPhar’s Technology and Talent
UniPhar’s goals are to grow horizontally, expand, and scale on demand. SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, SAP Extended Warehouse Management (SAP EWM), and SAP Datasphere play a pivotal part by, on the one hand, standardizing IT processes across the group and, on the other, managing distribution and inventories across different warehouses with SAP EWM state-of-the-art warehouse management software, while using SAP Datasphere for data management.
In a nutshell, says Wojdowski, “the SAP technology stack allows us to effectively advance our program quickly,” using SAP Business Application Studio to build applications and extend SAP solutions. SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) acts as an accelerator to move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, helping UniPhar transform with confidence and speed using proven migration tools and enabling integration across applications.
SAP, and especially SAP BTP, is not only a technology enabler but also allows UniPhar “to innovate and attract the top talent as an organization because people want to come to work in an environment that is innovative, that allows you to try things, and that allows you to experiment,” Wojdowski says.
Laying Foundations with SAP Today for Tomorrow’s AI
UniPhar is currently in the implementation process and Wojdowski has a keen eye on the future, noting that “eventing, observability, and telemetry” will form the basis of future artificial intelligence (AI) enhancements.
Data is critical in the pharmaceutical industry, he explains, and UniPhar “has terabytes and terabytes of data that we are not physically able to analyze because it’s complex and massive.” The plan is to migrate the data to a central repository and in the future “plug into an AI system to track patterns, track customer behaviors, track market trends, and react accordingly.”
Make a Challenge a Proof-of-Concept
SAP solutions are enabling UniPhar to innovate and step into the future on its own terms, with standardized processes, best practices, and foundations for AI technology that can scale and strengthen UniPhar’s mission to improve patient access to pharmaceutical services and products across the globe.
Wojdowski says SAP seems to have a solution for every business requirement, but even though “you may have to customize and change things that SAP provides out of the box, at the end of the day it’s a full enterprise suite and you can run SAP end-to-end if you wish.”
And Wojdowski’s advice for other companies planning a digital transformation? Challenges can become proofs of concept – there is no need to accept that something cannot be done. “Be brave, be daring, and ask questions. Challenge your partners and challenge yourself,” he concludes.