1,000 AstraZeneca employees will run its SAP estate by 2016
It now has three hundred staff ready to take over its Asia Pacific SAP Enterprise Central Component (ECC) and will have placed around 700 more IT workers to support AstraZeneca's remaining seven ECCs by 2016.
The technology centre will focus on "technical leadership", supporting and developing a range of applications and services from smartphone applications for sales teams to analytical tools, speeding up clinical trials, to deploying analytical tools for scientists.
The centre, which opened its doors last year, will reduce AstraZeneca's reliance on service providers - part of a larger cost-cutting plan.
It is bringing its SAP estate in-house to assist with an ongoing merger of its many ERPs and "hundreds" of disparate systems, project manager at AstraZeneca, Jonathan Charles, said during a Panaya ERP testing summit in Tower Bridge.
The central SAP team have already put best practice measures in place to avoid duplication across testing for migrations and upgrades, Charles added.
"It's quick ramp-up. By the end of this year, support for all SAP systems will be done from Chennai in-house. That's one of the reasons behind the drive to toward standardisation. We can't have eight ways of doing things in eight different systems."
As part of this best practice, AstraZeneca has refined its bug-testing processes for upgrades and migrations using a combination of semi-automated testing tool Panaya and SAP solution manager.
Using the tool has "harmonised the way we approach change documents for tests," Charles said. Employees no longer need to print and sign off test evidence or change documents and Panaya stores each test in an online library so they can be re-cycled - cutting overhead.
In one instance, AstraZeneca's testing window was halved thanks to Panaya's semi-automation features. IT at the firm's Macclesfield manufacturing plant used development tests from Panaya's application as a script that was loaded into SAP Solution Manager, signed off and re-executed.
But he added that "it works very well in stable areas like purchasing and sales but is a bit clunky on production processes."
The firm, which outsources some project and support services to Infosys and Computacenter, recently announced it would use cloud-based file-sharing tool Dropbox across the entire organisation, signalling a transition toward cloud-based services.
AstraZeneca underwent a job cull between 2009 and 2012, making over 30,000 job losses over four years. It is currently hiring for a range of IT professionals in its Indian hub.
Image: Flickr/Ana C.