CIOIN

David Briskman

VP and CIO

Ranbaxy Laboratories

Executive summary

For ERP upgrades, consultants are viewed as guides and often safety nets, without which few enterprises dare go. But they come at a significant cost. Ranbaxy decided to go without one and saved costs, increased project control and delivered business results with minimal challenges.

Multiple acquisitions and seven years of double-digit growth had pushed Ranbaxy's hardware needle into the red. David Briskman, VP and CIO of Ranbaxy had an ERP upgrade in mind, but he also knew it was a huge and complex task, given Ranbaxy's size.

Briskman decided that the task would be done in-house. An ERP upgrade on this scale would have got most organizations to get a consultant, and hordes of subject matter experts - immaterial of the price. But he had realized that when organizations enlist consultants for such high level projects, the cost of consultancy usually makes up 60 to 70 percent of the total cost of the project. The rest largely goes in procuring hardware and software. By taking a D-I-Y approach, Ranbaxy lowered the total price of the project and reversed that ratio.

Health Check

India's largest pharmaceutical company, the Rs 7,200- odd crore Ranbaxy has a complex IT fabric. Most of those locations run on a single instance of SAP  4.6c version of  R/3 ran on a 32-bit windows 2003  environment  and SQL 2000 with database of about 2.25 Terabytes, growing at about 45 GB a month. Transactions were growing with the business, and by 2008, about 70 percent of the people with access to the system - were using the ERP concurrently, on 2,500 custom-built programs and about 900 types of transactions .Briskman and team decided to overhaul the entire ecosystem, upgrading the hardware, the software including the operating system, the database and the ERP platform.  SAP ECC6 was soon running on more efficient.

David vs. Goliath

Most CIOs would hire a consultant at this stage but Briskman lead his team to the more risky alternative, DIY." We have been doing rollouts and upgrades without any consulting help and decided that this project should be no different," says Briskman.

In the first phase the IT team would move their current ERP to the new servers. The   Windows Server would also be scaled up to a 64-bit environment and the database would be upgraded to SQL 2005. The second phase, led by the SAP COE Head, Neeraj Kukreti, would involve a combined upgrade of SAP environment and migration of the data code pages based on MDMP in earlier SAP R/3 to Unicode on the newer ECC6.While Windows and SQL were moved to the 64-bit platform and SAP R/3 made way for SAP ECC6, business warehouse and APO were integrated.

By September  2008, the maximum CPU utilization level at the database server dipped from  about 100 percent in January 2008 to about 40 percent,. Similarly, the maximum RAM utilization level at the server slid from 74 percent to 48 percent.

Look! No Consultants

Although Briskman had complete faith in the skills of his 20 plus-member SAP team, he felt that there were several ways the upgrade exercise could be derailed.  He began by defining the results that were expected from the upgrade. Tempering unrealistic business expectations from the upgrade helped avoid undue pressure on his team. "We told the business that the systems were dying and needed an upgrade just to keep the lights on. That's it." In the meanwhile, he put his in-house team through all the appropriate SAP since this would be easier than bringing in a consultant and then training them on Ranbaxy's business. Briskman, Singh, Kukreti, and the rest of the team spent three months planning the entire upgrade exercise in conjunction with SAP, Microsoft and HP, before they embarked on the actual execution.

As they worked towards the actual upgrade, Briskman and his team undertook testing and carried out dry runs like a religion. Testing played a more crucial role at Ranbaxy's upgrade because compliance is key to the pharmaceutical major. Briskman says his team had the whole process detailed down to the minute.

Briskman now plans to leverage his team to implement a large number of productivity enhancements based on the new capabilities of ECC6.