Snapshot
- Undertook a digital transformation and expansion initiative to propel their company into the digital age
- Migrated full SAP landscape to Azure-hosted environment and ran next-generation applications on AWS through Megaport connectivity
- Reduced ETL extracts for Analytics workloads by more than 150%
- Cut latency for real-time analytics by more than 75%
- Reduced the cutover timings for core SAP migration to Azure by 30%
About Zuellig Pharma
Zuellig Pharma is one of the largest healthcare services groups in Asia. They provide world-class distribution, digital, and commercial services to support the growing healthcare needs in this region. The company was started almost a hundred years ago and has grown to become a US$10 billion business covering 13 markets in Asia with over 10,000 employees.
Zuellig Pharma’s purpose is to make healthcare more accessible. Their people serve over 320,000 medical facilities in Asia and work with over 1000 clients including the top 10 pharmaceutical companies in the world.
More recently, the Company launched the Zuellig Health Solutions Innovation centre to develop new services and address some pressing healthcare needs in Asia. Since then, their teams have been focused on creating data, digital, and disease management solutions, supporting patients with chronic conditions and helping payors manage healthcare costs. They are also making headway in using big data to inform their decisions and those of their clients, on how to optimise for greater operational accuracy and efficiency.
Challenges
- Zuellig Pharma’s objective was to design an effective digital transformation strategy as a part of their vision to become a technological and digital innovations hub for the healthcare industry.
- The strategy encompasses an enterprise-wide multi-tiered digital expansion and transformation plan which includes a ‘front-end’ integrated ecosystem of digital solutions to enable the core operations and activities of their business, as well as that of their clients and partners.
- For their strategy to be successful, it was crucial that they first create and solidify a firm foundational technology infrastructure and architecture on which to support their ambitions.
- Specifically, they needed to make possible the concept of ‘data exchange fluidity’ which underpinned everything they intended to do. This would require the ability to circumvent the typical performance and latency challenges companies with similar initiatives face – and also save on costs.
Solution
Zuellig Pharma bolstered their digital transformation strategy by creating an intelligent hybrid and multicloud architecture using an ecosystem of diverse applications that digitised day-to-day business processes. With Megaport connectivity as the foundation, the Company established a resilient data integration layer that facilitated fluid data exchange between their growing set of digital endpoints.
“Our digital transformation strategy, underpinned by Megaport connectivity, has propelled Zuellig Pharma’s sales force into the digital age through real-time data access on the go which has increased decision-making autonomy and boosted our competitive edge on the ground.”
CIO, Maikel Kuijpers – Zuellig Pharma
Key Points
- Zuellig Pharma migrated their entire SAP landscape from their on-premise infrastructure to an Azure-hosted environment. This involved a 40-system production landscape with a footprint totalling more than 65TB from where all of the Company’s logistics operations, warehouse activities, and transactional activities were driven.
- The Company also incorporated SAP HANA, SAP’s database management system that stores and retrieves data as requested by applications – into their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) strategy.
- Zuellig Pharma provisioned connections to both Azure and AWS to run next-generation applications like a cloud SAP ERP system and Tableau to drive all internal insight, analytics, Machine Learning activities and external reporting obligations.
- Megaport’s NaaS solution was a key enabler to these objectives allowing Zuellig Pharma to make their early cloud strategy a possibility with easy, efficient, and right-scaled connections enabling the Company to move data whenever and wherever they needed.
- Zuellig Pharma unlocked super-speed communication and interaction highways between their ecosystem of applications and technology systems with the support of Megaport’s flexible SDN.
“Megaport’s commitment and unique ability to guide us in expert fashion as we started out on a journey that was new to us. They truly went the extra mile to ensure that we could implement the solution on time.”
CIO, Maikel Kuijpers – Zuellig Pharma
Benefits
Zuellig Pharma propelled its business into the digital age by fast-tracking digital transformation and laying the groundwork in becoming a data-driven organisation. Through Megaport’s on-demand, scalable, and private network, they:
- Circumvented the typical performance and latency challenges companies with similar ambitions would have faced.
- Enabled their data processing, reporting, and analytics to be conducted in a consolidated and consistent manner not only across their business but also their clients, customers, and partners.
- Reduced the cutover timings for core SAP migration to Azure by 30%.
- Reduced ETL extracts for Analytics workloads by more than 150%.
- Cut latency for real-time analytics by more than 75%.
Future Plans
- Zuellig Pharma will continue to expand further across the regions as well as embark on large-scale rollouts of the applications that have been developed to continue their work in new healthcare initiatives.
- The Company is advancing their cloud journey by looking into additional providers available on the Megaport Network.
- Zuellig Pharma is also considering Megaport Cloud Router as a cloud to cloud solution.
Zuellig Pharma Named ‘Information Visionary’ at Singapore’s IDC Digital Transformation Awards 2018
Zuellig Pharma’s focus on digital transformation came in response to the need to drive increased innovation and collaboration within the healthcare industry for better healthcare and patient outcomes. Working with Megaport, SAP, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services, Zuellig Pharma developed a cloud-based system to facilitate and streamline data processing, reporting, and analytics. This network solution earned them the ‘Information Visionary’ award at the second Singapore IDC Digital Transformation Awards 2018. The award recognises organisations that have demonstrated excellence in their approach to data and information.