Sanofi India: Moving beyond automation

Sanofi India’s major thrust areas for IT implementation are manufacturing, sales and marketing, HR and finance. To support these business areas, the technology focus is on Business Process Management (BPM), mobility (internal and external) and analytics, according to Milind Khamkar, Sr. Director Information Solutions – India & South Asia, Sanofi India

After the adopting and promoting the automation of business processes with right workflow strategies, the company stabilised major transactional systems like ERP, SFA, Planning, etc but it was observed that there were many processes connected to these major systems which were efficiency killers as well as causing delays in the decision making process.

With the strong sponsorship of the CFO, Khamkar relates that they have launched an initiative towards the simplification and harmonisation of business processes using workflow tools.

As a part of these initiatives they identified as many as 50+ processes which could be automated for agility, redundancy control, process controls and compliance, expediting decision making and enhancing customer services.

According to Khamkar, “We are progressing well on adopting analytical tool across sales and marketing. We are supporting BYOD, helping our specific field force with iPAD for eDETAILING and daily call reporting, launching customer facing mobile applications etc. Our BPM journey is progressing well.” For this year, the IT team is busy integrating state of the art technology in the new headquarters in Mumbai.

Building long-term differentiators

Spelling out the vision behind IT strategies, he says, “Apart from the generic ‘Better ~ Faster ~ Cheaper’ in automation, IT is helping business enable with innovation, engage with automation and empower with technology. This will help the business to bundle value added services with the product, increase market reach and improve quality of services to customers.” These will prove to be the differentiators in the long run.

Looking ahead he says, “Unfortunately, the pharma industry has not yet utilised IT to its greater strength.” He explains that in many companies, IT is still the enabler of functions, taking care of operations or more crudely orders from others.

He has personally been involved with and seen the evolution of many IT implementation initiatives within the pharma industry and therefore has first hand experience of the many business problems which can be tackled by technology. But he rues the fact that there is no common IT forum for pharma. Signing off he says, “Some of us have got together in an informal way to address this vacuum but this initiative will definitely need support and recognition from across the business.”

– Milind Khamkar, Sr Director Information Solutions – India & South Asia, Sanofi India