Nigerian German Chemicals Leverages SAP Tech for Digital Transformation

For Nigerian-German Chemicals to realise its vision of becoming a leading pharmaceutical company that is respected in the local Nigerian market and globally, it needed to fast-track its digital transformation journey with the help of market-leading technology and expert partners.

Nigerian-German Chemicals (NGC) is one of Nigeria’s premier manufacturers and distributors or pharmaceutical products. Built on a heritage of multinational pharmaceutical excellence, NGC has a more than 40-year track record of improving and enhancing the healthcare and well-being of the people of Nigeria and the West African region.

According to Chris Akinyomi, Project Manager at NGC, the company’s business transformation process needed the support of world class application infrastructure that would enable NGC's transition to a healthy and rapidly growing company of international repute.

“We were looking to standardize our business process across the organization while controlling deviations from standard processes and ensuring good governance. Given the level of IT maturity within our company, we also needed to find an implementation partner with a successful track record in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as a technology partner that understands global best practice in the healthcare industry.”

Akinyomi said that SAP Enterprise Resource Planning was a unanimous choice given its fitment to the pharmaceutical industry and its adoption by world's leading pharmaceutical companies. “The project implementation included Sales & Distribution, Material Management, Production & Planning, Quality Management, and Finance & Controlling. It was essential that the project be implemented as quickly as possible, so our choice of partner would also be determined by their knowledge and experience with pharmaceutical industry best practice, which allowed us to pre-configure some of the solution.”

Jay Shah, Associate Vice President and Enterprise Applications Head at Nihilent, who were the local implementation partner, said NGC relied heavily on SAP and industry best practice, leaving customization at a minimum.

“We used templates and a solution demo system to accelerate the blueprinting process and reduce the implementation timeline. From there, the project scope and timeline were strictly adhered to and controlled by the project manager, and any change requests were challenged to justify their business value. This ensured a focused implementation process that eliminated waste.”

Shah said the remote location of NGC’s head office, in Ota in the Ogun State meant connectivity was sometimes limited. “To encourage the user team to invest additional hours to meet the project deadlines, we secured executive team buy-in who incentivized the user team. This commitment and involvement of the senior team was invaluable in ensuring we were able to meet project objectives while still allowing users to practice and build confidence with using the system.
 
Akinyomi said that after six months of using the new system, NGC has achieved a fair measure of control over operations. “We are satisfied that the solution has improved our efficiencies and has created a foundation for future improvements in the organization, which may include better analytics to enable accurate strategic decision-making. We will also look to SAP support in the new product development process, leveraging its experience in the pharmaceutical industry to improve our business operations.”

Pedro Gurreiro, Managing Director: SAP West Africa, said: “The commitment of the executive team at NGC made all the difference in enabling the expert SAP partners to fast-track the company’s digital transformation journey. With NGC now operating on global best practice, it is ideally positioned to leverage its core system for fast-tracked product development and better operational efficiencies. This is a great showcase of how the confluence of business, technology and industry insight can unlock the benefits of digital transformation for companies in the pharmaceutical industry.”