Hummingbird Spells Relief for Ranbaxy
Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. is the largest pharmaceutical company in India, and is among the top 10 companies in the international generic medicines space. Ranbaxy's products find their way onto the shelves of households in more than 100 different countries, via ground operations in more than 25 countries that carry goods from the company's seven international manufacturing facilities.
To make sure the company runs smoothly, Ranbaxy's technology infrastructure is a mix of best-of-breed technologies. But getting a grasp on enterprise-wide data inside Ranbaxy was often like guessing what's stored in a huge warehouse. To solve this problem, the senior management at Ranbaxy decided to open the doors to information by implementing an enterprise data warehouse solution to support business intelligence.
Business Challenge—A Unified View
The existing environment had an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application as the base for a host of other systems that capture information from multiple data sources, giving rise to isolated islands of data.
"We needed to build an enterprise-wide data warehouse architecture that would provide a unified view of our product information," says Vijay Sethi, director of business solutions at Ranbaxy. "Our goal was a system that would support simple yet powerful report generation to help our strategists recover precise technical and business information quickly and easily from the company's rapidly growing pool of data."
Ranbaxy's first task was to find a powerful extraction tool that could delve into the disparate data sources to recover historical information. All that data would then have to be combined with a powerful, scalable business-intelligence infrastructure that could analyze multiple data sources and generate customized reports based on requirements from a wide list of corporate users.
The IT team also determined that Ranbaxy's new data warehouse system needed a friendly, graphical user interface, so that more users could access the system without being challenged by its underlying complexity. Ranbaxy also wanted the ability to set up smaller "data marts," strategic centers of warehouse information tailored for different sets of Ranbaxy analysts.
After analyzing multiple technology offerings from several different vendors as well as from some local resellers, Ranbaxy chose Hummingbird Genio® and Hummingbird BI™ (business intelligence) product lines, implemented with assistance from a diverse end-to-end global IT solutions provider and strategic consultant.
Hummingbird Solution Spells Relief
Hummingbird Genio, the data integration component of Hummingbird Integration Suite, changes the company's view to information by enabling mining of information from a mix of legacy databases, including SAP as well as Microsoft SQL and Excel databases.
For handling SAP data, the Hummingbird Genio tool includes an SAP MetaLink that helps users locate data, and a native SAP DataLink specifically tailored for extracting data from SAP environments. The rest of the data could be extracted simply by using native ODBC functionality.Once extracted, Ranbaxy's data is sent to Hummingbird BI, a suite of business-intelligence tools. Hummingbird BI includes query and reporting functionality to translate data into the basis for intelligent strategic business decisions.
"Hummingbird Genio has enabled us to tie together multiple information sources including our SAP applications, and consolidate enterprise-wide data into our data mart for reporting and analysis," says Vijay.The Hummingbird BI software supports multiple database formats, ensuring that Ranbaxy won't be locked in to a single database vendor going forward, an important bargaining point during times of tight IT budgets.
Improving Ranbaxy's View
In short order, Ranbaxy's system opened the door to a wide range of analytical processes, which not only allows Ranbaxy to see what it has, but also predict what it needs to do.
"The consolidation of enterprise data—financial, sales and product information—empowers our management to make faster and better decisions," says Vijay. "The information they need for tactical and strategic planning is all available now through a single query tool."
Data at different Ranbaxy sources were captured and loaded into the data warehouse using the Hummingbird Genio tool. At this stage, business rules were applied to deliver a single version of the truth. The Hummingbird SAP Metalink and DataLink were used to locate and extract necessary data from SAP tables, while Hummingbird Genio fetched data from Excel templates for budgets, sales plan and secondary sales.
All data were then "cleansed" on a staging server to produce a unified, standard version of data from multiple systems. The cleansed data were then used to populate Ranbaxy's custom data marts, the smaller repositories of strategically aligned information.
With a new data warehouse operational, Ranbaxy was able to create a long list of customized reports, including comparisons with historical data. After a successful trial, the company plans to roll out the solution to the entire sales personnel across various geographies.
"Now that we have successfully implemented this reporting capability from our SAP and other systems at our headquarters in India, we are extending it to include centralized reporting for the various countries around the world," adds Vijay.
Industry: Pharmaceutical
Organization: Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd.
The Challenge:
- Develop an enterprise-wide data warehouse architecture that will provide authorized users with simple access to a unified view of structured information;
- Enable analysis of data from heterogeneous sources; and
- Improve the process of recovery of precise technical and business information.
Solution: Hummingbird Genio and Hummingbird BI
Key Benefits:
- The new data warehouse architecture significantly reduces the time it takes to create ad-hoc reports essential for strategic analysis;
- Hummingbird Genio enables the extraction of data from the various data sources using the same tool and significantly reducing the time spent on getting the required information in place. Also, the training requirements for users are minimal; and
- The easy-to-use Hummingbird BI tool has provided users who may have less programming expertise with access to critical business information.
Hummingbird Ltd. is a leading global provider of enterprise software solutions, employing over 1450 people in 40 offices worldwide. Hummingbird Enterprise™ 2004 is a state-of-the-art integrated enterprise content management platform that enables organizations to securely access and manage business information such as documents, records, e-mail or financial data. Please visit:www.hummingbird.com