Edwards Lifesciences is a US based company manufacturing heart valves, oxygenators, catheters, etc to address specific cardiovascular diseases. Selling medical technologies in more than hundred countries, the company’s APAC region only handles trading activities.

Recently, the company’s APAC region went live with SAP ERP to bring about uniformity in its operations. While Australia and New Zealand went live on SAP B1 in February 2007, the Indian operations commenced in April 2007 and were completed in about two and half months with a number of customisations. The Korea and China implementations will be completed by April 2008. The company plans to have a common MIS for the APAC region.

Web-based reporting and connectivity

"The Asia Pacific region handles the trading activities at Edwards Lifesciences. So all the countries in the APAC region are deploying SAP B1 for uniformity in operations," said Waman Tamhankar, finance manager, Edwards Lifesciences, who headed the SAP implementation.

"The company was on ITG (International Trading and Management) before going for SAP. The company essentially switched over for a couple of reasons. We wanted to start with web based connectivity and reporting. There was also a need for a uniform ERP across APAC, which prompted us to go for SAP," expressed Tamhankar.

Customising SAP B1

AG Technologies was chosen to implement the project, which was done in about three months with a fifteen-day parallel run with ITG. "We went document by document to make our partners understand the business processes," explained Tamhankar.

The entire exercise underwent a lot of customisation to suit the Indian requirements.

The software was billing the product, which had passed its expiry date and also allowed unauthorised execution of the sales order i.e the system accepted the purchase order even if it was higher than the sales order. So, some manual controls were executed and the SDK (System Development Kit) also enabled the company to overcome inconsistencies.

“To maintain a commonality across Asia, we also identified some common areas and worked on them,” informed Tamhankar. These included segregation of duties, price controls, volume controls, customer acquisition and credit controls. The system was adapted to capture the customer information in multiple stages.

"The credit control functionality was unique for us," said Tamhane. The software had its set of functions but to comply with the company controls, some features were added.

The company accepts post dated cheques but the software did not support that. An appropriate customisation was done to that effect. Also, there was an alert created as a reminder to verify the date as per the credit terms fixed by the distributor. The drug license control was also introduced.

SAP B1 only supported the customer location and product information. There was no field for warehouse location and as there are different sales tax rates for different states, the software needed some intelligence to connect every transaction. AG Technologies came up with an idea of assigning a code number to every warehouse and similarly for the sales tax rates.