Herbal medicine manufacturer makes S/4HANA shift with SNP

Touching on a well-trodden topic for many SAP users at present, the migration from ECC to S/4HANA is certainly dreaded by some customers while being hailed by others. Global herbal medicine manufacturer, Bionorica, was one such customer who sought to convert its existing ERP ECC 6.0 system to SAP S/4HANA with the help of SNP. So, here’s the story:

Bionorica’s operations, headquartered in Neumarkt, Germany, are spread across over ten countries globally, and 1,200 of its 1,800 employees are SAP software users. Its product reach is even larger still as, after 85 years, doctors, pharmacists and patients in over 40 countries are now said to vouch for Bionorica’s scientifically researched herbal medicines.

Two projects achieved in one step

With ECC component modules in place, Bionorica had a large instance of SAP software, specifically SAP Financial Accounting and Controlling (FICO), manufacturing-based modules like Production Planning (PP), Plant Maintenance (PM), Quality Management (QM), Materials Management (MM), in addition to Warehouse Management (WM), Business Partners (BP), Sales and Distribution (SD), Logistics Execution (LE) and Workflow (WF).

Bionorica sought to move to the next-generation SAP suite, and the project was made more complex by including new process changes in accounting, an account-to-ledger approach with the account assignment to ledgers in the SAP S/4HANA general ledger.

In a conventional migration, this task would have involved two separate projects. However, Bionorica opted to partner with SNP to complete the project in one step. With an automated approach to traditional consultancy, SNP’s in-house data transformation platform, CrystalBridge Transformation, and its migration approach, BLUEFIELD, enable multiple tasks to be processed in parallel.

With this flexibility and efficiency during the migration, Bionorica completed the project in 14 months and with a short system downtime of under 48 hours during the ‘one weekend’ migration, all with no need for subprojects.

SNP’s predefined best practices, pretesting and change simulations ensured the installation fulfilled specific legal requirements for validation in the pharmaceutical industry: The software validation confirmed that the new SAP S/4HANA system runs according to the predefined specifications and meets these criteria in day-to-day business.

With SNP’s automated software reducing manual tasks, saving time and resources and reusing tried-and-tested automated transformation patterns, any complex issues that occurred during the switch to SAP S/4HANA ledger technology were also resolved.

For Christian Kunzelmann, head of information technology, Bionorica SE, partnering with SNP made for a smoother ride to S/4HANA.

“By moving to SAP S/4HANA, we have created a modern system and prepared our organization for further digital transformation projects,” said Kunzelmann. “Thanks to SNP’s software, we were able to make changes to accounting processes at the same time and ensure a smooth start to SAP S/4HANA operations despite the high business requirements.”

Now successfully shifted to SAP’s S/4HANA, Bionorica can look to optimize its business processes, respond to changing market requirements with agility, and keep pace with technological developments.