Pharma major gets a digital factory
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- TCS Pace
TCS Pace™: Speedier Digital Transformation & Innovation in Business
Highlights
TCS Pace™ reimagined manufacturing, finance, procurement, and supply chain at biopharma giant Takeda, and facilitated the digital transformation of several processes across the company.
Between the years 2019 and 2022, the digital factory has released 12 digital products for Takeda and reduced time-to-market for new products and services by 50%.
In this article
The need to continually transform
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited partnered with TCS in September 2019 to develop an end-to-end BizDevOps digital product delivery model.
The idea was to push the pedal on developing digital-led products, to innovate at scale, and transform customer experience in the areas of supply chain, manufacturing, procurement, and finance.
Takeda creates treatments for patients in multiple therapy areas, including small molecule and oncology, biologics, plasma and cell, and gene. In the pharmaceutical industry, as is seen in many other sectors, the development of technology assets has traditionally been approached via fixed long-term planning processes that rely on project-based information technology life cycles, and monolithic enterprise resource planning (ERP) technologies that underpin complex global business processes.
Takeda and TCS together saw room for enhanced agility, collaboration, improved end-user experiences, and an opportunity to build more granular digital products and services on lean cloud platform.
Innovation at scale, and end-to-end
EDGE reimagines the way Takeda launches digital products and services across its global organization.
Leveraging TCS Pace™, a philosophy and framework for innovation at scale, an innovation factory delivery model—Enhanced Digital Global Experience (EDGE)—was built to help support the way Takeda launches digital products and services across its global organization.
This agile factory-based model co-innovates solutions across multiple operating units at Takeda, leveraging cloud technologies, design thinking, and agile software development to provide an end-to-end digital product development service. The approach is a departure from the traditional business analysis and design-build-test linear project life cycle, to one of co-creation, cross-functional collaboration, and continuous business-driven iteration.
Digital factory: The EDGE of innovation
Some examples of what Takeda’s digital innovation factory produced in a span of two years.
Manufacturing >> Drug substance optimization
A machine learning solution to help Takeda supply planners optimally allocate Drug substance bags for Drug Product production. This innovation led to a significant drop in raw material scrappage and an increase in production output.
Distribution & Logistics >> Order tracking app
A mobile track-and-trace solution providing real-time visibility about product consignments for a Drug product with a 72-hour shelf life.
Distribution & Logistics >> Transportation Modeler
A service to help decision makers evaluate alternative transportation and shipping scenarios to help reduce CO2 emissions in the supply chain.
Finance >> Digital Accruals
A global tool used by Takeda employees to capture financial accurate accruals and support accelerated period closing.
The numbers do the talking
Between the years 2019-2022, the digital factory has:
Released 12 digital products
Evaluated over 40 potential use case concepts
Reduced time-to-market for new products and services by 50%
Conducted 40+ design sprints
These years have also been a witness to massive shifts in how enterprises operate internally and function within the global marketplace. The pandemic and its fallout have forced a rethink on traditional ways of functioning and delivery.
Capturing the essence of this transformation, Hansjoerg Magalhaes, Global Product Manager, ERP Commercial and Supply, Takeda, says, “Since 2019, we have developed a deep partnership with TCS to set up and run an innovation factory that’s developing digital products and services across Takeda. This model centralizes domain expertise, design thinking and lean agile product development as part of an end-to-end capability that is driving digital transformation across our global supply chain.”
At Takeda, instituting the factory model at such a time allowed for innovation at scale and speed to produce an all-encompassing digital transformation with TCS as its ally.
Through our partnership with TCS, we have established a digital factory to deliver innovative products and services—this is known internally as ‘EDGE’. Our digital products are creating significant impact and we are scaling the factory model in response to growing demand for our services.
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