SAP Helps Life Sciences Companies Mitigate Risk and Achieve Compliance With “Perfect Plant” Center of Excellence

ndustry Partners Collaborate to Simulate Plant Environment, Helping Customers Visualize “Real-World” Business Outcomes

NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today unveiled the “Perfect Plant” center of excellence (COE) for the life sciences industry. Representing the collaborative efforts of SAP, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and Werum, the “Perfect Plant” COE provides a virtual view of a life sciences plant floor environment and lets users “test drive” end-to-end, real-world manufacturing business processes through SAP solutions and partner composite applications. Via role-specific user dashboards, manufacturers can visualize performance outcomes. The technology helps life sciences manufacturers to lower risk and accelerate time-to-value, increase product quality, reduce waste, and lower rework and product recalls.

“Under increasing pressure to reduce the cost of operations, manufacturers in the life sciences industry need real-time synchronization of manufacturing processes and business processes to improve performance,” said Greg Gorbach, vice president of Manufacturing Research, ARC Advisory Group. “The manufacturing scenarios co-innovated by SAP and its ecosystem, using solutions from SAP and its partners and conveyed through the ‘Perfect Plant’ center of excellence, effectively showcase the value of bridging the plant-to-enterprise chasm. By exploring complex scenarios or business process templates that involve multiple roles, domains and applications, manufacturers can easily see how their own business could be improved with this technology.”

The “Perfect Plant” COE aims to help life sciences companies experience how a common business process platform can help manage key industry-wide business scenarios in order to consistently deliver quality products in compliance with industry regulations, while lowering total cost of operations. Leveraging SAP applications such as SAP® ERP, SAP® Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence (SAP MII) and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform, coupled with deep industry-specific partner solutions for manufacturing execution, the “Perfect Plant” COE allows customers to “test drive” real-world business processes via role-specific user dashboards to visualize business outcomes. For example:

* A vice president of manufacturing or operations can achieve a multi-site operational view to assess how well one plant is running vis-à-vis another in terms of people, processes and resources to monitor, measure and improve operational performance.
* Plant managers have a plant-wide view of system performance and resource utilization to ensure they are meeting key performance indicators (KPI), sense and respond to exceptions when they happen and enable continuous improvement of assets, processes and people.
* Production supervisors can better monitor the state of the equipment deployed as well as the quality of each batch produced, to ensure each production run produces a perfect batch.

Collaborating with Partners for Customer Success
The “Perfect Plant” COE offers customers a “real-world view” of how the SAP for Life Sciences solution portfolio works in association with robust partner solutions delivered by Werum and services by TCS to address pain points, increase efficiencies and deliver business impact. For example, combining the power of the SAP for Life Sciences portfolio of manufacturing applications with Werum’s pharmaceutical-specific plant floor production solution enables a seamless, end-to-end, shop floor-to-enterprise business process, delivering tighter integration between planning and execution, as well as an enhanced view into all plant operations. The result is a cost-effective, efficient and coordinated “sense and response” approach to customer demands.

“TCS, with its significant expertise in delivering SAP solutions and domain knowledge in pharmaceutical manufacturing, is delighted to partner with SAP and solutions providers such as Werum to deliver solutions for compliant manufacturing operational excellence to our life sciences customers,” said Ashtad Engineer, global head, SAP Adaptive Enterprise Solutions, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). “These end-to-end, service-enabled, plant-to-enterprise scenarios truly demonstrate operational excellence for multiple roles in a manufacturing context, delivered by SAP and partners such as Werum on a common platform and at a potentially lower risk of adoption for our industry-leading customers in the life sciences industry.”

As part of its ongoing mission to drive co-innovation, minimize the risk of adopting new technologies and provide enhanced value to customers across all industries, SAP will follow the development of the life sciences “Perfect Plant” COE with the creation of similar center of excellence environments for the chemicals, mill products, high-tech and industrial machinery and components industries.

“Life sciences manufacturers around the world face myriad challenges throughout the manufacturing lifecycle, from product consistency to compliance and meeting demand on a global scale,” said Jim Sabogal, vice president and head of Life Sciences Industry Business Unit, SAP AG. “With the ‘Perfect Plant’ center of excellence, we are providing a forum for some of the leading minds in technology to work together to address these challenges. With a majority of the world’s leading life sciences manufacturers running SAP solutions, we aspire to leverage our domain expertise in manufacturing and those of our ecosystem of partners to deliver solutions that provide real value to the life sciences industry.”