Roche Positions Itself for a Successful Future With S/4

When a device breaks down or maintenance is due, it's our job to provide the technicians with the spare parts they need," explains Sebastian Höhr, Head of Spare Parts Management at Roche. The challenge here: "We are a small unit in terms of personnel, but we have to manage a large product portfolio with more than 20,000 products and a large number of business transactions every day. We export products to more than 150 countries." A high-performance IT infrastructure that supports efficient and reliable processes through automation is correspondingly important.

A central digital backbone

As part of the Group-wide Aspire programme, Roche is carrying out a global SAP S/4 transformation in order to create a central digital backbone for the entire Group and to harmonize and standardize all of the companies' business processes. Among other things, the existing solutions for Sales and Distribution and Demand Planning will be replaced by new systems. "The system is not a decorative accessory for us, but an essential tool that enables our day-to-day business," says Sebastian Höhr. "The Aspire programme offers the opportunity to standardize, harmonize, automate and digitalize processes in order to prepare us for the future."

Roche is divided into the Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics divisions, which in turn include numerous companies for finance, supply chain and research and development. Global Spare Parts Management, supported by cbs, is taking an individual approach within the transformation project. "Although there are a large number of common processes that we can and should standardize and harmonize, not everything is the same. We should tackle the same problems with the same solutions, but we don't all have the same problems," says Sebastian Höhr. As part of Aspire, the global project team is developing a global template that best covers the requirements of the various companies. However, in order to achieve the best possible result in terms of spare parts management, the solution has to be put to the test time and again: Are all requirements really met? Are there processes that can be better implemented outside of the global template?

Sebastian Höhr: "We want to ensure that the new solution meets our needs and requirements from Spare Parts Management in order to optimize our business sustainably and effectively. That is why we are working closely with cbs, becoming active instead of passively waiting for the global template." The first commercial branches will use the new system next year, while the introduction of the new S/4 templates is planned for the global distribution centers in 2027.

The fact that Roche and Spare Parts Management are relying on the support of cbs is no coincidence. The project partners already know each other from previous collaborations. According to Sebastian Höhr, one thing in particular was decisive for the decision to work together again: "I have always found cbs to be a strong partner that not only has excellent technical expertise, but also understands the business processes and can translate these into technical solutions so that everything fits together seamlessly, whether through customization or development. I have always perceived this ability as a great strength of cbs and continue to do so."

Fits and gaps

In the current case, the cbs team acts as a link between the global project team and the Spare Parts organization. The most important task is to extract the knowledge from the business, translate the processes and requirements into IT language and compare these with the template so that fits and gaps become known. These gaps are eliminated by the team using various solution approaches. "cbs does a really great job here and we value the partnership-based collaboration that has connected us in various contexts over the last ten years or so," concludes Sebastian Höhr.

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