Alloga AG expands use of IBS Pharma
• Leading logistics provider on the Swiss pharmaceutical market successfully concludes expansion of vertical industry solution provided by International Business Systems • All core business areas of the value chain fully covered.
Hamburg on 23 April 2007
IBS Pharma, the vertical industry solution by International Business Systems (IBS), a world-leading supplier of business software systems, consulting and services, is now covering all strategically important business systems along the value chain of Alloga AG. Since the autumn of 2006 and after successful use of the IBS financials solution, the leading Swiss pharmaceutical logistics provider with a pre-wholesale market share of 50% has extended its use of the software solution IBS Pharma to the warehouse management, inventory control and distribution areas. The company is part of the Galenica group, has 130 employees and a daily output of some 900 orders.
IBS Pharma is aimed at pharmaceutical wholesalers, generics manufacturers as well as transport and logistics companies specializing in the pharmaceutical industry. The solution is internationally used in companies such as Galexis (Switzerland), Itriafarma (Italy), Oriola (Finland), Audifar (Brazil) and SB Comércio Ltda (Brazil). International Business Systems has established its global competence center for IBS Pharma in Germany; it is here that the solution is centrally maintained and developed. As a whole, IBS has some 2.000 employees and more than 5.000 customers in no less than 40 countries.
Competence as a decisive factor
As early as 2003 Alloga AG decided to exchange its legacy ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system for IBS Pharma. It was their goal to deploy the vertical solution, which was already in use at their sister company Galexis, throughout Europe. Besides the extensive and profound knowledge of IBS Pharma that already existed in the Galenica group, it was first and foremost the convincing capacities and the flexibility of the system with regard to its expandability that turned out to be the decisive factors.
Convincing project
After the financial system had been used successfully for two years, the plan called for an expansion with the modules Distribution, Warehouse Management, Integrator, Alert Management, Business Partner Request, Inventory Control, Radio Frequency and Analyser. For this purpose, Alloga AG started by detailing the 10 most relevant processes and by specifying all the 124 business cases that were to be automated. In July 2005 the first of 30 clients (a pharma manufacturer) was already active in a productive environment as a pilot case, a second client followed in March 2006. Meanwhile, all business transactions of Alloga AG with 80 clients are processed exclusively by IBS Pharma.
“The biggest challenge was to map all existing operational processes along with peripheral devices, physical resources and connected systems with their interfaces while operations were continuing and to run them live in parallel beginning in July 2006,” says Gottfried Gafner, Project Manager IT at Alloga AG. “The excellent cooperation with the IBS team helped us succeed.”
“Apart from human resources, today we run our entire business including financials with IBS Pharma,” says Daniel Giger, CEO of Alloga AG. “We are very satisfied with the capacities and the performance of the solution, and are confident to break even by 2010.”
“We are very glad to have won Alloga AG, another local market leader, for our internationally used solution IBS Pharma,” emphasizes Andre Grigjanis, Vice President IBS Pharma. “Once again the software has proved to be an ideal vertical solution which can to a great extent be tailored individually to the operations of the client company. It is especially pleasing that, in close cooperation with our customer, the installation is FDA-compliant, something which is demanded by large pharma manufacturers.”
Hardware used at Alloga
An IBM eServer i5 550, situated at the Galexis data processing center in Schönbühl, functions as the host system, while the four servers (with Intel Xeno 3 processors and 2 GB RAM each) used for the client operations are located in Burgdorf. There is a total of 80 PCs running under Windows XP Professional, with an additional 12 mobile workstations and 40 mobile terminals on warehouse vehicles and 20 handheld scanners (all with 5250 emulations).
Additional information on Alloga
Alloga AG, situated in the Swiss town of Schönbühl, is a provider of logistics services for the pharmaceutical industry and a leader on the Swiss pre-wholesale market. Alloga is a company within the Galenica group and has more than 130 employees. In 2005 some 900 orders per day were shipped to the 8,000 customers – mainly wholesalers and retailers, hospitals and consumers – of 30 pharma manufacturers, moving 230,000 packages on 26,000 pallets. Alloga AG has an ISO 9001:2000/SGS certification. Please go to www.alloga.ch for more information.
Additional Information on International Business Systems (IBS)
IBS AB, (XSSE: IBS B) is a world leading provider of supply chain management solutions for distribution, demand-driven manufacturing, financials and business intelligence with group revenue of EUR 255 m. IBS’ primary focus is large and mid-sized distributors as well as sales and manufacturing companies in international groups. http://www.ibs.net
