When Bayer was looking for a solution to increase the automation of certificate creation across their diverse divisions, Tenthpin’s deep expertise was sought out to find the best way forward. Bayer’s manual certificate generation process was impacting all of their divisions, so the time to co-innovate and seize the benefits of automation was obvious. Find out how Bayer and Tenthpin combined their Life Sciences expertise to develop a solution that would drive efficiency in the certificate generation process.
Background
We all know that SAP S/4HANA is used widely across Life Sciences. It’s hard to think of the industry without it. But, especially in Quality Management, S/4HANA doesn’t cover all processes that Life Sciences companies require for product safety and compliance. Even with recent developments in Quality Management, such as SAP Batch Release Hub and Tenthpin Quality Management Evolved (T/QME), there are still big gaps.
Now, Life Sciences companies are trapped. Why? Because they’re trying to avoid custom developments to keep the SAP S/4HANA core clean, but at the same time, no standard solutions are available that provide both the required flexibility and adhere to regulatory requirements (like GxP). A headache that most want to avoid.
This is when Bayer approached Tenthpin. The company were looking for a solution to increase automation of certificate creation across their diverse divisions. The certificate generation process impacts all three divisions: pharma, consumer health and crop science. More than that, requirements vary significantly by division, market and product category, sometimes even by customer. Clearly, they needed a solution to provide this flexibility while adhering to compliance requirements.
Challenge overview
One of the biggest challenges to the co-innovation of Bayer and Tenthpin was immediately apparent: Bayer’s certificate processes and templates were often not harmonized within a single division, but managed site by site. This led to hundreds of different certificate templates being in use, exerting a high manual effort to maintain the required master data and custom develop each certificate.
Plus, while many certificates were already created automatically in SAP, some still had to be adjusted or created from scratch manually. This involved filling in Microsoft Word templates, copying and pasting values from SAP or Microsoft Excel. Such a manual certificate creation can easily take hours and lead to errors; which is not efficient for any of the stakeholders involved. The solution would need to remove this bottleneck.
Goals of the co-innovation
Bayer started to harmonize the certificate templates and processes to show “One Bayer” to customers and their own country subsidiaries. They set the clear goal to automate certificate generation using SAP data to the largest extent possible and especially eliminate the need for manual triggers which can be easily achieved with solutions based on SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).
At the same time Bayer had to ensure flexibility in certificate generation to meet the special needs that already exist and will continue to arise in the diverse markets that the company serves. In the Crop Science division, for example, the certificates often have to carry Latin names for seeds. These terms cannot be maintained in SAP S/4HANA easily.
Keeping the core clean is a mantra within the CORE project that is currently underway for the company-wide S/4 Transformation. Therefore, any solution development or implementation had to be aligned to their CORE program while providing significant and immediate value.
Approach to the co-innovation
The Tenthpin approach is how Tenthpin has achieved success in Life Sciences consulting. They apply the same approach when it comes to building and co-innovating solutions for key players in the industry. But let's look at where Bayer started out and where Tenthpin’s approach was pivotal in delivering the co-innovation.
After thorough market evaluation, Bayer recognized that no standard solution exists in the market that meets their needs. At the same time, they saw that the gap of automated and flexible certificate generation was also one recognized by peers. They needed to plug the gap for themselves but also saw the exact same need for the industry at large.
Bayer approached Tenthpin to co-innovate a new standard product with the intent that it will be used by other Life Sciences customers, who, together with Tenthpin, would also bring in best practices. But why Tenthpin? They were selected due to their close collaboration with SAP, where they co-developed solutions like SAP Batch Release Hub, SAP Cell and Gene Therapy Orchestration and SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management. This perfectly positioned Tenthpin to ensure future compatibility with SAP solutions. Their deep expertise in Life Sciences and experience in SAP BTP development as an implementation partner for other SAP platforms also made Tenthpin a perfect pick.
The project was set up in a way to ensure that the co-innovation correlates with S/4HANA CORE program at Bayer; so the release was timed to meet the go-live requirements. At the same time, the co-innovation provided the flexibility to add requirements as they came up during the project, but with a focus on meeting the CORE timeline.
During the project, regular review sessions were conducted every four weeks with Bayer to ensure the designed and later developed capabilities meet their needs. This included collaborative requirements gathering, design reviews, show and tell sessions, User Experience (UX) review sessions, validation alignment, and more. At the same time, Tenthpin’s vast and deep industry expertise was critical to getting all of Bayer’s requirements to align with general industry needs.
Conclusion
In the end, the co-innovation project delivered a product that fully meets Bayer’s needs and is now being rolled out to the various divisions and sites of Bayer and additional Tenthpin customers. The collaborative approach was very well received and ensured that Bayer’s goals of automating certificate creation across their diverse divisions were achieved.
This co-innovation is a great example of Tenthpin’s mission to develop cutting-edge software solutions for Life Sciences companies to support their growth. It demonstrates that Tenthpin’s deep industry expertise, excellent technology skills, and an unwavering focus on user experience ensures that their solutions are the preferred choice for successful market leaders in pharma and biotech.
