The past year has seen a lot of scientific progress as organisations develop an ever-growing reliance on technology. From the development and production of COVID-19 vaccines to supporting logistics companies in their distribution, SAP supply chain management solutions are at the forefront of defeating the global pandemic.
SAP Chief Executive Officer Christian Klein recently participated in the “Move the Needle” challenge initiated by Business Roundtable, a nonprofit association whose members are CEOs of major companies in the United States. In the video, he shared how the SAP community supports businesses, societies, and individuals in dealing with the impact of the pandemic.
“Our software has helped companies make their supply chains more resilient, adjust business processes, and stay closer to the employees and customers. We as well support many logistics companies and organisations around the globe that are at the forefront of the vaccine distribution,” Klein maintained.
According to Klein, 17 of the world’s 20 major vaccine producers are already running their production on SAP solutions. This includes the end-to-end process, from vaccine development to regulated distribution through administration and post-vaccine monitoring.
Accelerating the COVID-19 Vaccine Distribution
One of these producers is BIOCAD, the manufacturer of the COVID-19 vaccine Sputnik. The company is one of Russia’s largest vertically integrated pharmaceutical and biotechnology firms.
During SAPPHIRE NOW 2021, Dmitry Gordeev, Chief Financial Officer (VP Finance & Supply Chain) at BIOCAD, revealed how they used SAP to plan and produce COVID-19 treatments, medicines, and vaccines.
Following its implementation project called BIO 1 that started in April 2019, BIOCAD adopted SAP S/4HANA to transform the company. Since going live with the solution in January 2020, the biotechnology firm is continuing its digitisation efforts to expand manufacturing and research and development (R&D) while also tracking and tracing its medicine across the entire value chain.
According to Gordeev, the functional scope of the project included solutions such as SAP Sales and Distribution (SAP SD), SAP Advanced Track and Trace for Pharmaceuticals (SAP ATTP), SAP Material Management (SAP MM), SAP Production Planning (SAP PP), and SAP Concur for four Russian legal entities.
“It’s been a really big transformational project that’s not only technical substitution of existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution but really re-engineering of the complete scope of business processes,” Gordeev explained.
Another producer, Moderna, which began delivering its COVID-19 vaccine in January, is relying on SAP to help in the distribution of hundreds of millions of vaccine doses. To assist with serialisation and distribution, the company uses SAP Digital Supply Chain solutions.
SAP Supply Chain Management Solutions Help Battle the Pandemic
Meanwhile, Andre Bechtold, Senior Vice President, Head of Value Experience at SAP, also talked about how healthcare organisations leveraged SAP technologies as critical care was put to the test during the early days of the pandemic.
Highlighted in a session during SAPPHIRE NOW 2021 is Parkland Health & Hospital System’s story of using SAP solutions to address the needs for infection surge modelling and demand management such as symptom checking and contract tracing.
With the help of SAP, Parkland Health & Hospital System was able to tackle urgent needs related to COVID-19 by delivering three important innovations including a COVID-19 command center, a critical inventory tracker mobile app, and an online, self-service, multilingual COVID-19 symptom checker chatbot.
According to Bechtold, situations such as those encountered by Parkland Health & Hospital System triggered SAP’s value chain. The German software giant’s industry-leading solutions portfolio consisting of SAP ATTP and SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Sciences supports a joint effort to eliminate counterfeits in the supply chain.
In October 2020, it also launched the SAP Vaccine Collaboration Hub (VCH), which assists governments and their industry partners in improving supply chain efficiency and effectively managing mass vaccination efforts. The VCH’s rollout demonstrates SAP’s commitment to delivering crucial infrastructure that allows network partners to collaborate more quickly.
Furthermore, SAP established a COVID-19 Emergency Fund to support organisations on the frontlines. A significant part of the funds donated go towards the COVAX initiative which aims to promote the advancement of COVID-19 vaccines to secure a way to end the acute phase of the pandemic.
“The last year has made one thing clear: health truly is our greatest asset. And we can only overcome today’s challenges together,” CEO Kein concluded.
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