Sphere Healthcare selects SAP for pharmaceuticals

Peter Dinham
Monday, 02 March 2009 18:03

IT Industry - Deals

Business software provider, SAP, has won a three-way contract bid is to provide its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system to Sphere Healthcare, a large Australian pharmaceutical contract manufacturer.

Sphere announced today that it had chosen SAP through gold channel partner Extend Technologies, as its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system moving into 2009.

Sphere company secretary, Michael Power, said the company would be replacing a six year old in-house built legacy application with SAP Pharmaceuticals after conducting a competitive ERP bid between three high profile solutions, from tier one and tier two IT vendors.

According to Power, Sphere was looking for a system that would bring about organisational change, not just carry out transactional duties, and the company had chosen SAP for a number of reasons, with the main ones being “solution fit and scalability to grow our business and with our business.” The company, he said, was aiming to increase exports in 2009 and must control costs effectively to remain competitive.

While SAP will provide its ERP system to Sphere, the company’s CFO made the point that it was very much Extend Technologies’ involvement that sealed the deal for SAP.

Extend Technologies defines itself as a business applications and transformation company and Sphere’s CFO Gary Smith said Extend “had a lot to do with our decision.”

“While the SAP software is world class and has more than 30 years committed industry knowledge, it was Extend’s customer credibility, attitude and approach to the project that pushed SAP as our first choice,” according to Smith.

Michael Power said that by using the SAP Best Practices, pre-configured, template solution, the implementation was estimated to take 6 months, and he projected significant improvements in operating cost and delivery capability as a result of the implementation.

Sphere describes itself as “a large-scale Australian contract manufacturer of complementary healthcare products and the largest soft gel manufacturer in Australia.” It says it manufactures more than 4,000 products, including a wide range of market-ready products such as contemporary vitamin, mineral, other nutraceutical ingredients and herbal formulations.