Client Overview
Strides Arcolab
Established in 1990, and listed in Bombay Stock Exchange, Strides Arcolab is Bengaluru headquartered global pharmaceutical company. Strides manufactures pharmaceutical
formulations in various dosage forms including sterile injectebles, oral dosage forms like capsules,tablets and softgel capsules. Strides operates and has significant presence in Australia, Africa and India and series of strategies is expanding its North American and
European growth.Strides has manufacturing facilities in Bengaluru,India and overseas
facilities in Milan,Warsaw,Singapore and Lagos.Strides employs approximately 2,500
people across the globe and has marketing presence in over 50 countries.
Planvisage Solution
The implementation started in mid 2008 for both Oral dosage form and sterile division in Bengaluru. The solution was integrated with Stride’s SAP (version 4.6) ERP. Main objective of the solution was to improve production planning and also to have effective inventory control.
Planning Before Planvisage
The marketing team along with the business development team generates the demand for
next quarter (rolling). Based on confirmation and due date the planning team generates the
monthly demand plan. Considering this demand background MRP is run in SAP for all the
pending orders which in turn generate planned work orders based on batch sizes defined and the purchase requisitions (PR) for the shortage material. Planner manually adds the different PR quantity for an Item and provides the purchase team a PR list with consolidated quantity. Purchase team converts the PR’s in to purchase orders (PO’s) and acknowledges the planning team with available dates of material. Based on material availability capacity plan is manually generated.
It becomes material driven plan rather capacity driven. Some of the issues with their planning process were
• In sterile division due to the fluctuating nature of demand, handling the dynamic batch size
was difficult. As the MRP was run based on standard batch size the PR quantity was not
the actual required quantity. After each MRP run in SAP the planner had to manually recheck the purchase requisitions and over write the quantities to suite the batch quantity.
• No accurate information flow between purchase and planning team. Due to this gap
any change in delivery dates would come in to light during the late hours.
• Manual adjustment of capacity due to varying material available dates became a cumbersome activity.
• Material planning for the promotional products was difficult as they were not considered as
demand in SAP and were handled manually.
• End to end planning took about a week’s time and re planning to address the changes was
time consuming.
• Planning frequency was once in a month. Soany problems like delay from supplier, machine breakdown, cycle time variation or material rejection, the effect was not known until the next month.
Planning by Planvisage
Based on the demand generated by marketing, forecast and promotional products demand, plant wise plan is created taking into account real time material and capacity constraints. A feedback is provided to the marketing on the commitment date of orders.
It helped Strides in
• Providing advance visibility of which procurement orders have to be expedited / deexpedited based on capacity plan.
• Purchase team was provided with the report of last committed date of PO’s at the end of every week which helped them to reconfirm the dates based on which the new capacity plan was generated by system, the following week.
• Planning frequency was made every week. So any problem like delay of supplier, machine
breakdown, cycle time variation or material rejection, the effect was know every week.
• Handling multiple batch size gave the planning team the flexibility to alter batch size based on the demand quantity. Purchase requisition was generated based on the new batch size
reducing the inventory build up.
• Planner has the complete control over the MRP as he had the flexibility to set the demand
quantity as per the priority. Marketing team is well informed whenever the demand was
altered to meet the economic batch quantity. This helped in reduced FG & SFG inventory as
well raw material inventory.
• A rolling plan considering demand for the next four quarters is designed to run at the end of
every quarter which depicts Strides long term capacity profile and material requirement.
These values were used by the management for various strategical decisions making.
Purchase department used the above values to intimate the future requirement to their
supplier’s well in advance.
• Data for planning in Planvisage was extracted from SAP which was also used to create various exception reports to improve master data hygiene in SAP.
Integration to SAP
Data from SAP is downloaded through ABAP scripts in flat files in a shared folder. This data is uploaded into Planvisage through the import utility tool. It accesses the flat files from the shared folder and updates in Planvisage database.
Overall System Architecture
The overall system architecture deployed at Strides is as given below:
Product built on Microsoft.Net architecture
Data between client and web-server is exchanged through xml. Client references web server through url address
.Net framework has to be installed on all the machines. It is available for free from Microsoft web site
IIS has to be installed on the server. It comes bundled with operation system (Win2000 or XP Professional Edition)
Business logic and data access layer is deployed over IIS
Data access references database through ODBC connection
Different instances of server can be installed within one single IIS
Database could be SQL or MySQL
Uses memory resident database for better performance
