RPG Improves Network Effectiveness With SAP Rollout

RPG Life Sciences is a Pharmaceutical company dealing in manufacturing and marketing of bulk drugs also known as API (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients), pharmaceutical formulation, fermentation and biotechnology. The company rolled out SAP in April 2007. Pradeep Pathare, Manager – IT, RPG Life Sciences shares in detail about the implementation with Biztech2.0.

What is the geographical spread of RPG Life Sciences and how is it networked?

We operate two units at Ankleshwar, Gujarat and one at Thane, manufacturing pharmaceutical formulation, API and Bulk drugs respectively. Since the SAP implementation in April this year, the locations along with the HO at Worli have been networked on WAN. The datacentre is situated at Nalco, DAKC.

The Thane unit is networked on MTNL while the Worli office is connected through a Tata leaseline, both running on a speed of 2 Mbps. The company also has a back up site running on broadband at Mhape. There is an alternative back up of Internet bandwidth in case the leaseline or VSAT is down.

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Were there any networking challenges that the IT team encountered?

RPG Life Sciences has a network of eighteen Carriage and Forwarding (C&F) agents around the country. The agents wanted a ubiquitous connection through Internet and VSAT, on the same machine to improve network performance.

For this, firstly, the agents should have a direct Internet connection where their PCs should be able to pin a Yahoo or a Rediff IP, to connect to the RPG server. Secondly, for the VSAT connection, the agents should have a company antenna at their location and a LAN card in their PC, enabling the flow of data from the LAN card to the VSAT, to the satellite and finally hitting the company’s data centre VSAT.

The PC has a single gateway for the Internet LAN card, thus we suggested the C & F agents to have an additional LAN card for VSAT, to process requests coming from the company’s server. The company on its side created a command to route the request from the agents’ LAN card.

Which marketing software has the company deployed?

SAP has helped us prepare advanced reports and conduct market and Product analysis to identify the competitiveness of the company. The marketing team does this by using the Exim Software. We keep including patches as and when they are introduced.

The Software provides real time information (posted by vendors) on the international pharmaceutical market including new products introduced, Company’s market share of the products that guides the marketing team to take effective decisions on product placements, R&D, compare market share of the products vis-à-vis competitors etc.

Can you please share with us the process of the SAP implementation?

The approximate cost of the implementation was one and a half to two crore. The challenge that prompted us to opt for an ERP was silos of applications resulting in duplication. The deployment was completed in five months.

We initiated the evaluation in 2005 with Oracle, BAAN and many other vendors. Ultimately, the company zeroed in on SAP. There was also a lot of discussion for selecting the implementation partner too. The company partnered with obt Global (now Zensar obt global) for their pre-configured pharma solution, keeping in mind their expertise in the pharmaceutical vertical.

Every department was asked to select a representative who would co-ordinate with the core IT team in data migration, which included identifying the unused data, filtering, checking, validating and updating the data.

We had plans to integrate the expert management software, which was being run in-house, however it was dropped since the SAP had an inbuilt expert management software. One of the reasons for the fast implementation was there was no parallel software running during the SAP rollout.