Ranbaxy Laboratories saw many organizational changes over a period of seven years. There were multiple acquisitions and the company also experienced double-digit growth. All this put its 32-bit ERP system under a lot of stress and it was fast approaching its limitations. 

To compound the situation, the SAP 2000 maintenance was about to expire as SAP was terminating 32-bit platforms. In fact the SAP R/3 - 4.6c implementation was already on extended maintenance. The SAP system is business-critical as it manages 80 percent of the company’s sales.

Instead of simply upgrading the hardware to address the issue, Ranbaxy decided to do a complete system upgrade: hardware, OS, database and moved from R/3 - 4.7 to a fully Unicode enabled ECC 6.0 platform. Upgrading all the elements of the system at one time enabled a leap frog of technology, with performance improvements and enhanced business capability in the new environment.

Upgrading everything at one shot enabled efficient use of resources to perform on a single set of user testing instead of creating multiple rounds of testing to achieve similar results in multiple projects.

Ranbaxy enabled complete integration with all its other SAP products through a consistent Netweaver platform. The new version has enabled process efficiencies and the deployment of a new functionality. Maintenance costs have been reduced through the reduction of customizations and the move to a standard support (versus an extended out-of-life support). 

The firm achieved a 40 percent reduction in customizations through a ‘clean up’ of customizations and alignment with the new functionality. System performance has been improved over two-fold to facilitate daily and monthly processing.