SAP SE - Best New Business-to-Business Product

Company: SAP SE, Walldorf, BW, Germany
Company Description: SAP is the market leader in enterprise application software, helping companies of all sizes and in all industries run at their best: 77% of the world’s transaction revenue touches an SAP system. Our machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), and advanced analytics technologies help turn customers’ businesses into intelligent enterprises.
Nomination Category: Product & Service Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Business-to-Business Products

Nomination Title: SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Science

If this is a brand-new product, state the date on which it was released. If this is a new version of an existing product, state the date on which the update was released:

Most recent release is SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Science 2011 (released in November 2020) next planned release is SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Science 2102 (planned release date February 20nd, 2021)

Drug counterfeiting is becoming a global threat to people’s health.

As a response governments world-wide have enacted directives that require the pharmaceutical supply chain members to uniquely identify (aka. serialize) products on an item level (smallest sellable unit) to enable the identification of falsified medicine through track and trace or verification at the point-of-dispense.

More and more countries are establishing legislation covering serialization – however rules, message orchestration, message content and derived processes are very different. Pharma Manufacturers world-wide make huge investments into packaging equipment, changes in supply chain procedures and IT to keep up with existing and upcoming legislation.

Companies however are struggling with the variety of the different national regulations, the overall complexity of the topic and the huge data volumes.

SAP Information Collaboration Hub for Life Science (ICH) is a productive business network in the Pharmaceutical industry and facilitates the messaging of traceability and serial number data across the pharmaceutical supply chain enabling the customer to “connect ONCE” and share data with all across the connected network.

-The productive blockchain solution to enable a saleable returns verification in accordance to the US legislation DSCSA contains more than 1.500.000.000 transactions.
-To be compliant with regional or national serialization legislations ICH offers the option for regulatory Reporting scenario to its customers. To date ICH supports regulatory reporting for the European Union (EMVO), Russia (OMS and MDLP); Saudi Arabia (SFDA), Indonesia and for the upcoming Brazil requirement for vertical reporting to ANVISA.
-Due to the new legislation with respect to serialization of pharmaceutical items in Brazil, we expect additional 20.000 business partners in 2021 and 2022.
-The US 2023 legislation (DSCSA) which includes the point of dispense may add another 50.000 business partners to the network.

The ICH installed base is about 900 companies, exchanging pharmaceutical data. In our customer base, we do have 12 out of the top 20 pharma companies and there are 2 out of the 3 big US wholesalers (70% of the US market for prescriptive medicine). The network handles about 8.000.000 messages per month via SAP Business Technology Platform.

"By leveraging the pharma network across all our stakeholders, we have the transparency to guarantee that patients are receiving the medicine they need and not a faked copy." (Andreas Henrich, IT Enabling Functions and Platform Services, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH)