Johannesburg, 21 Apr 2005
Merck SA has successfully changed its business model to service 10 000 customers, up from just 90 four years ago. In line with this change, the pharmaceutical and chemical group outsourced its pharmaceutical logistics, warehouse management and distribution functions to a third-party organisation that enabled it to reach individual doctors instead of supplying primarily wholesalers and pharmacy chains.
"By outsourcing the functions that we did, we were able to grow our sales footprint and reach individual doctors at the coalface of the industry," says Pierre Dorfling, BI administrator at Merck SA.
To enable that strategic business model shift, Merck SA needed to integrate a number of business systems, including ACS-EMBRACE, SAP R/3, a data warehouse and a Cognos reporting environment. Merck installed ACS-EMBRACE as its core financial and business system in 1993.
The local operation of this international group turns over in excess of R300 million with 330 employees, 200 of whom are IT users. The head office is in Modderfontein, Johannesburg, and its factory in Wadeville with sales offices in Cape Town and Durban. The pharmaceutical factory produces 3.2 million dosage units annually.
Integrating the various business systems of Merck SA and its supplier, the company contracted Associated Computer Solutions (ACS), which had also supplied the ACS-EMBRACE ERP software, to supply and deploy Ascential Software`s DataStage extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) tool. ACS was also responsible for designing and implementing the overall systems architecture.
Centerfield Software distributes and supports Ascential Software products in SA and ACS is a value-added reseller (VAR) of the product.
"DataStage acts as the ETL tool in the system, receiving transactional data from the third-party`s system and loading it simultaneously into Merck`s SQL Server data warehouse and the ACS-EMBRACE ERP system," says Julian Field, MD of Centerfield Software. Cognos`s business intelligence (BI) tools, PowerPlay and Impromptu, are used to deliver complex and sophisticated reporting and statistical analysis of the data in the warehouse. The summarised data in ACS-EMBRACE is used to drive the production and procurement systems and all of Merck`s financial requirements.
"We FTP a couple of hundred rows of data from our third-party distributor to the warehouse, but there are thousands upon thousands of rows of data from the chemical division`s ERP system that are placed into the warehouse every night," says Dorfling. "The entire process takes about an hour-and-a-half and since upgrading DataStage to version 7 we never have to touch it; we don`t even know it`s there. The entire operation runs without any intervention at all and we have literally not touched the software for a year. Our users did not know that we had used an ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) tool and that means it has performed its task flawlessly."
Merck SA has an IT staff of four, with Dorfling the only one assigned to the warehouse, the Cognos reporting environment and DataStage.
"The support from Centerfield Software is brilliant," says Dorfling.
He adds that he plans to upgrade to version 7.5 when it becomes available in the near future and expects the process to be as painless as the last, which took less than three hours to complete and had zero impact on operations.
"In the foreseeable future we will keep DataStage because it does what we want so effortlessly and there is so little maintenance from our side to ensure it runs every day, and I`m very happy with the performance that it gives us," he says.
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