A Medical Device Manufacturing client achieves SAP PI implementation for manufacturing medical equipment
The Client
The client is a steadily growing group of companies that caters to 90 countries. It provides customer-oriented services to the healthcare market. The client is a well-known manufacturer of musculoskeletal devices used by medical specialists in both surgical and non-surgical procedures.
Overview
The client aims at providing innovative and responsive solutions in the medical equipment delivered. It designs and manufactures a wide range of medical instruments, consumables and disposables for procedures such as reconstructive, fixation, spinal, and softgoods and bracing.
Project Scope
The absence of integrated view of operations affected decision-making and forecasting of outputs negatively. The project enabled collection of information directly from the plant floor.
The gap between the floor-level functional technologies, organizational planning of the plant, logistics systems, and the overall executive decision-making was to be bridged.
The integration would enable increased performance, reduced production time, efficient component tracking, and ensure implementation of quality and regulatory compliance, thus improving the manufacturing process.
Challenge
Although the client had switched to the electronic systems, the manufacturing and quality processes were still handled manually. The manufacturing systems were generally isolated from one another and the rest of the processes. In addition, many of the production units had non-integrated information systems in place. These issues increased challenges in harmonizing the plant and obtaining accurate data from the control systems across the organization.
Solution
SAP ERP is an integrated software that combines several functionalities such sales, account and finance, inventory, etc. of an organization. These basic functionalities are called SAP business modules. Furthermore, the organizations also have pre-existing propriety tools that are often impossible to be replaced. SAP PI is a powerful platform to integrate the legacy systems with the new SAP business modules.
The project was initiated by analyzing and documenting the various domains. It was followed by defining the functional and technical requirements of the SAP PI and ABAP application. Communication between the legacy systems and SAP PI ensures structured representation of relevant data and finally the delivery of the refined, consistent data. Furthermore, the analysis also assists in handling any configuration changes to software bundles such that they fulfill business process requirements.
SAP XI is compatible with software bundles of other companies. It reduces integration costs considerably by providing a common platform for interfaces. Thus, it was used to design and develop interfaces to facilitate the exchange of information among SAP, business partners, internal systems and other external systems. The fundamental component of the XI is the SAP Integration Server that enables communication between various systems and includes XML data mapping, transformation, and standard JDBC data look-ups.
The client gained benefits across local and global domains, enabling efficient management of workload for the production lines, as consistent data became available across production parameters, material flow and accounting.
The solution also improved component tracking by immediate access to batch records and information. Real-time data helped the client to detect production problems, optimize production,
decision-making and plant-level planning, and in turn enhancing efficiency.
Value Delivered
- Efficiency & Cost Reductions
- Process Enhancement
- Individual Process Tracking with Accuracy
- Record-keeping errors eliminated
- Quality Assurance & Adherence to Regulatory Compliances
- Increased Supply Chain Performance through Process Standardizations