Cloud Life Sciences SAP

Life Science industries: Combating challenges with Cloud

Publish Date: June 6, 2018

The term ‘Life Sciences Industry’ includes pharmaceuticals, medical devices, drug discovery, biotechnology, healthcare, research and development, and associated domains. As this industry sector flaunted to upcoming next to IT, it is necessary to reconsider the organizational stock of internal operations, processes, and minimize failure of operations and increase performance and profitability. The life science industry can achieve operational and financial excellence using solutions based on next-generation technologies such as Mobility, Analytics, IOT, and Cloud. These solutions enable Life Sciences companies to enhance global health innovatively and cost-effectively.
Current total global public cloud market has increased to $178B from $146B in 2017. The expected growth is 22%. Currently, over 80% of healthcare organizations are using cloud platforms making the healthcare industry ahead of industry trends. As healthcare providers continue to accelerate cloud services adoption, the emphasis will be placed on configuration, performance, and security. Cloud solution also set a good foundation for upcoming advances like Big Data and Blockchain.

Key challenges in life science industry
The primary concern of life science industry world is patient and personalized healthcare. Therefore, in the healthcare ecosystem, demand for collaboration amongst different sectors is increasing to have a single view of data, connected devices, and integrated systems, real-time checks, faster information exchange, and reduction in processing cost. The demand brings a lot of challenges for the industry including few as discussed below.

Costs: Equipment failures, raw materials, working capital	Management and cost of regulatory compliance
Inadequate IT services	Management of regulations across countries
Research productivity	Logistics and Supply of materials and drugs
Lack of supply chain visibility	Minimizing wastages
Complex pricing	Inadequate business solutions

In addition to the generic points listed earlier, few challenges specific to industry segments need to be addressed specifically. For example, in pharma companies, challenges include costs of new drug discovery and tracking of experiments and results, competition in the generic segment, and increase in regulatory vigilance and audits. While manufacturing companies encounter the problem of shrinking margins, balancing productivity and costs, stricter vigilance and focused processes, and demand-supply gap. The supply chain segment needs to battle against non-availability of information, inefficient demand management, ineffective market intelligence, and issues related to batch expiry, and damages.
Reasons for adopting cloud services

Data access with compliance	Easy to install and operate
Value proposition	Real-time data/analytics for data management in pharma and RnD
Resource pooling	Support non-relational data structures, graphs, and operations
Pre-built solutions and services	Use cases in genomics
Reduction in maintenance/upgrade costs

What can S4 HANA do for the industry?
Successful digital adoption would require life sciences, stakeholders, to transform their entire stack of services and adopt an integrated services strategy. Organizations need a specialist solution or solution provider to understand the gaps in operations, and to guide implementing a tailored business solution, not only to address their challenges but to ensure that the solution is now a solid backbone helping the business perform smoother and better. A good solution provider with extensive domain knowledge and experience working with global organizations in the pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and medical device industries as well as the sub-verticals like formulations, bulk drugs, R&D, biotech, generics to contract manufacturing, compliant manufacturing, sales and distribution can guide your organization for adopting, implementing and sustaining cloud and cloud-based solutions like S/4HANA. S/4 HANA offers,

Optimized solutions for developing a pre-configured template for accelerating pharmaceutical projects that include functions for batch and recall management.
IOT-enabled Quality Assurance & Predictive Maintenance
Non-disruptive & Faster quality inspection
Improved tracking of process and product quality
Condition-based Monitoring of Equipment
Real-time visibility providing crucial data points for design and production
Responsive supply chain based on ‘Demand Signaling’ and ‘Integrated Business Planning.’
Agile and flexible supply chain framework for operations

Majority of the global life science industry has started adopting cloud-based services and has reaped the benefits of SAP solutions to fulfill their requirements and concur the challenges. The next logical step will be to advance in implementation and accept these solutions as a buddy and catalyst for the organizational performance excellence.
Contact us today to know how YASH can deliver higher business value for your SAP S/4HANA initiatives.