Mankind Pharma’s vision is a world where the latest medicines are available and affordable for everyone. In establishing a manufacturing and distribution network that delivers more than 1,000 products in 17 therapeutic areas to 34 international markets, including Africa, Asia, and North America, it has become one of the fastest-growing fully integrated pharmaceuticals companies in India.
At-a-Glance
To manufacture medicines and pharmaceuticals that are affordable for all, Mankind Pharma must focus on keeping costs under tight control. Moving to SAP S/4HANA running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications has enabled the company to accelerate its analytics and reporting, revealing new ways to increase efficiency.
Le défi
To build on a period of successful international expansion, Mankind Pharma has set a medium-term objective of earning annual revenues of $1 billion. To achieve this target, the company will need to scale up its operations to supply affordable medicines to millions more customers around the world.
To enable growth while maintaining profitability, Mankind Pharma must focus on maintaining cash flow and maximizing operational efficiency. For more than a decade, the company has been using SAP ERP applications to manage its core business processes and provide insight to support strategic decision-making.
However, as the company grew, its existing SAP application landscape reached its limits. Analyzing data meant crunching through 5 TB of data in the main ERP database and reports often took up to 24 hours to generate.
The company knew that it needed a new platform to support the next phase in its international expansion, as well as helping it adopt new technologies such as robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
Our new platform from SAP and SUSE enables us to generate key reports around 50 times faster… We’re always working with the latest data, which makes it easier to optimize our manufacturing plans, reduce costs and avoid waste.
Solution SUSE
Mankind Pharma decided to upgrade its existing SAP systems to a new SAP S/4HANA platform, supported by a highly resilient and scalable IT infrastructure. The company selected IBM Power Systems servers, which it deployed at its primary data center and disaster recovery site. Each server runs multiple virtual environments and uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the host operating system for the SAP S/4HANA applications and databases, as well as other systems.
“The combination of IBM PowerVM and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server enables us to support multiple SAP and non-SAP workloads in a very dense server footprint,” says Pramod Gokhale, Group CIO at Mankind Pharma. “The new solution requires 25% less rack space, and we have significantly reduced our power, cooling and management costs.”
To boost availability and ensure resilience in case of a disaster at its primary data center, Mankind Pharma has configured its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications instances to use active/passive clustering, enabling automatic replication of its production to its secondary data center.
To maximize performance, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications is specifically tuned to optimize the SAP HANA platform and SAP S/4HANA applications. Mankind Pharma also implemented SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, which allows administrators to install Linux kernel patches and updates on running servers, without needing to reboot the operating system.
Moreover, Mankind Pharma benefits from a licensing model that bundles the core SUSE Linux Enterprise operating system together with SUSE’s advanced high-availability, storage and network components in a single package, for greater cost savings and reduced complexity in license management for the IT team.
Les résultats
With its new SAP S/4HANA landscape running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, Mankind Pharma has gained a more flexible IT environment that removes the bottlenecks in its analytics processes. With faster access to insight, the company will be able to focus on its core business objectives, enabling rapid expansion into new markets and helping it progress towards its $1 billion revenue target.
“Our new platform from SAP and SUSE enables us to generate key reports around 50 times faster than ever before,” says Pramod Gokhale. “Instead of waiting 24 hours for materials and inventory reports, we can now get the figures in about seven minutes. This means we’re always working with the latest data, which makes it easier to optimize our manufacturing plans, reduce costs and avoid waste.”
With a more timely and accurate view of orders, the company has also been able to reduce the amount of inventory it needs to keep on-hand from 60 days to 45 days, which frees up capital to invest in expanding the business.
Pramod Gokhale adds: “The more efficiently we can operate, the more we can deliver on our mission to make medicines more accessible for everyone in our global society. Our new solutions have enabled our IT team to reduce operational costs by 20% per year, as well as boosting performance and enabling instant failover to our disaster recovery site in the event of an issue.”
He concludes: “With SAP S/4HANA powered by SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP Applications, Mankind Pharma has a robust, scalable platform that will support our expansion for years to come, helping us bring affordable medicines to millions more people around the world.”