Ego Pharmaceuticals wins highest award for Excellence at the annual SAP Customer Awards of Excellence – value engineering exercise projects return of 92.4%$ or $100 000 a month saving over 5 years
SYDNEY, Australia — SAP Australia today announced that Ego Pharmaceuticals (Ego), has won the CEO’s choice award (the highest award) at the annual SAP Customer Awards of Excellence for its hugely successful go live with SAP Business All-in-One and SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence software.
SAP Australia hosts the annual SAP Customer Awards of Excellence to celebrate the innovation and success of SAP’s customers and partners. The nominations highlight rich participation from companies of all sizes, across diverse businesses such as retail, aluminium, mining, utilities, consumer products, agriculture and healthcare.
The need for change was recognised by Ego a number of years prior to the implementation, but operational imperatives were always given priority over a new ERP system. It was only when Clarity proposed a Value Engineering exercise with the primary objective of developing a business case for the SAP Business All-in-One solution that the full extent of the benefits were quantified. The implementation, together with the implementation of SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence, is projected to provide savings of $100k per month – equating to an internal rate of return of 92.4 per cent over a five year period.
“We entered the awards in the hope of a chance to become the Best ERP implementation with an SAP Channel Partner. We are absolutely delighted to have superseded our hopes and to have won the CEO’s choice award for this category. We are honoured to be recognised amongst such high ranking SAP customers,” said Ego Pharmaceuticals Managing Director, Alan Oppenheim. “It’s a great achievement to solve the issues of our old disjointed systems and provide a new platform for our staff to grow the business.”
Introduced in 2001, the SAP Customer Awards of Excellence recognise the best SAP implementations with a focus on the successful alignment of IT and business strategy and the role played by SAP partners. The awards are judged by an independent panel consisting of SAP ANZ’s CEO, Tim Ebbeck, the General Manager of IT at Komatsu, Ian Harvison, the CIO from AXA, Peter Mahler, and the Head of Delivery from SAP ANZ, Mario Scicluna.
Each nomination must pass a three phase evaluation process to be recognised as a finalist. Judging criteria is based on the customers’ effective use of resources, their relationship with the implementation partner and SAP, their ability to understand and adapt to changing market conditions and the achievement of set business objectives.
Through the recognition of problems with legacy systems, Ego, together with implementation partner Clarity Consulting Group Australia, selected SAP Business All-in-One to implement an ERP system. The new system delivers improved business capabilities, enables Ego to grow and provides the strengths and benefits of a truly integrated system. The system is designed to support business growth, especially the strategic international expansion of Ego, and to deliver operational efficiencies through automation of key business processes, whilst assisting in the reduction of stock outs through the integration of sales forecasts with SAP’s closed loop planning functionality.
Under the banner of “Now is the time for change,” the project strove to introduce standardised business processes across a range of key functions with the aim of producing a more efficient and cost effective approach to the management and execution of everyday operation across Ego.
Although both SAP Business All-in-one and SAP BusinessObjects Edge have only recently been implemented (Go-live was end of May this year), it is viewed that the project has already achieved several of its key business objectives. The consolidation of a number of legacy systems onto a single platform has improved data integrity, increased visibility, enhanced reporting capabilities and most importantly, introduced efficiencies in a bid to better support the people of Ego to make a difference in the organisation’s effort in delivering great products to improve skin quality and thus profitable growth.
The success of the project has been attributed to the culture of Ego and the clear accountabilities elicited through the process owner structure, which facilitated prompt issue resolution and decision-making. Other measures that supported the success of the project were an informative change management program to enable the staff to cope with the massive change, the strong support of the steering committee to guide the project through the risks and issues encountered, constant communications of progress to all staff and importantly the ‘Spirit of Ego’ which is at the core of the values of the company.
“We, the judges, felt that Ego deserved a higher level of award than the category they had entered. This was due to the fact that several issues arose throughout the project that necessitated creative solutions. We saw that they addressed these with quality, value and innovation; leading to a result that is already achieving excellent business benefits. We were impressed with Ego’s Managing Director approach, running this project directly with the Clarity consultants. This enabled Ego to have true flexibility during the implementation,” said Tim Ebbeck, CEO of SAP ANZ.
“We were also impressed that the project strove to demonstrate support of the values of Ego as a company by providing staff with a professional, integrated system to enable them to better manage the information and processes of Ego.”
About Ego pharmaceuticals
Ego has become the largest Australian-owned pharmaceutical business specialising in the research, manufacture and marketing of high-quality skincare products. Ego now employs 250 people in 23 cities in nine countries. International sales have almost doubled in the last four years to $16 million across 24 nations. Exports are expected to account for one third of the Ego Pharmaceutical business revenue this year. During the past year Ego has received many awards of excellence including for its service, innovation, export and community service. www.egopharm.com
Further information:
Peter Sertori, SAP Australia and New Zealand, +61 2 9935 4845, peter.sertori@sap.com
Imogen Rimington, Burson-Marsteller, +61 2 9928 1530, imogen.rimington@bm.com
