AMERISOURCEBERGEN: REAL-TIME ANALYTICS FOR CUSTOMERS AND STAFF

AmerisourceBergen is one of the largest global pharmaceutical sourcing and distribution services companies, helping both healthcare providers and pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers improve patient access to products and enhance patient care.

AmerisourceBergen serves over 30,000 corporate customers that order 1.7 million items daily—the vast majority of which must deliver the next day.  Our industry environment is one of “fill or kill,” which essentially means that if AmerisourceBergen can’t meet expectations and provide a great experience, customers can just take their business to a competitor. The company is faced with managing orders internally and providing great support to our  customers—both require our IT department to deliver information on a timely basis.

We had been running SAP Business Warehouse on a legacy database. With data growing by 1 TB each month, timely access to information began to suffer. It got to the point where a key daily report for our finance group would simply not complete, leaving our people frustrated, in the dark, and looking for work-arounds. We deployed the SAP CO-PA Accelerator, powered by SAP HANA as a Sidecar implementation. The impact was immediate and transformative—reports that wouldn’t complete before, were now available in under five seconds!

Another priority was providing outstanding customer experience. They were not pleased with having to use four different tools to get the information they needed (they were running 25,000 reports per week). We decided to create an integrated portal on the SAP HANA platform.  While moving customer-facing reporting to a new platform made some of my colleagues nervous, the migration came off without a hitch and delivered huge performance gains to our customers. For example, the most common report run by customers runs in 3.6 seconds versus over three minutes on the BW system not running HANA.

In the next few months, we will complete the consolidation of our data and internal and external reporting on SAP HANA, providing a greatly simplified
landscape in addition to the performance gains.