Pharmacy

A pharmaceutical company seamlessly upgraded its SAP system, enabling operators to focus on the core business of making pharma products. Concerns arose about whether existing transactions and links would work, or even exist, once the upgrade was completed. All these were answered.

The goal of a SAP interface system is to alleviate manual data entry into SAP performed by production operators. The SAP interface system helps operators to request production material and product to their suite from the same terminal that is used for operating equipment. A major North American pharmaceutical company implemented its Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) in 2005 with the help of Grantek Systems Integration, a Rockwell Automation Solution Provider. The pharma company needed to upgrade its corporate SAP system from SAP R/34.6C to SAP ECC 6.0. The focus of the upgrade was on the technical aspects and the impact on the validated systems, Testing is vital for migration A pharmaceutical company uses multiple systems for production. A system controls Self-Guided Vehicles (SGV) to transport material in bins and totes to locations throughout its facility. The tote high bay storage area is controlled by a warehouse controls system. Whenever inventory is moved, a corporate SAP server has to be updated to reflect the inventory's new location.

The   company's   previous   MES solution completed about 19 different SAP transactions types within the manufacturing suites. Therefore, each of these transactions types had to be tested to ensure the upgraded SAP version worked in the same manner as the previous version. The company also had to ensure all automated data transactions worked correctly.

The upgrade team chose to automate the typical SAP operator transactions, reduce operator training time, ensure 100 per cent accuracy and simplify operator experience in the manufacturing suites. When operators do not need to interact with the SAP graphical interface, they can spend most of their time on the core business of manufacturing pharmaceutical products.

Grantek and the pharmaceutical company used a specific method of communicating with SAP for the MES application, called Remote Function Call (RFC). RFC is a standard SAP interface for communication between SAP systems. It calls a function to be executed in a remote system. Derek Kostelnik, Team Leader, Grantek, was confident that the application would upgrade seamlessly. However, he knew that the only way to be sure was to set up the 'sandbox' environment and test every transaction. The sandbox is an SAP client built solely for development, testing or training purposes.

Implementing the upgrade

Grantek's approach was to implement a variety of Rockwell Software® FactoryTalk® applications before the SAP upgrade. This mitigated potential production downtime and distributed the required validation workload. To accomplish this, the upgraded version of FactoryTalk applications had to be tested against the new version of SAP and the existing SAP version, using several SAP environments.  This pharmaceutical manufacturer has three types of SAP environments:   Production, Quality Assurance (QA) and Sandbox.

The production servers are redundant, high-availability servers used in the production environment. The QA servers are identical to the production environment, but all changes first must be validated against the QA servers before they can be migrated to the production environment. The Sandbox environment is the test and development system.

Similar to the SAP environments, the company also had two types of Factor/Talk environments: Production and QA. For each phase of the project, Grantek worked with the pharmaceutical company to test MES functions by performing end-to-end testing of each SAP transaction used in each environment. Grantek first performed an investigation to confirm the exact driver version and patch levels installed in the FactoryTalk interface that links the MES system to SAP. Grantek then determined what driver updates and patches were necessary for FactoryTalk to connect to SAP ECC 6.0. Next, Grantek updated the quality server (QA environment server), and directed it to the pharmaceutical company's SAP ECC 6.0 Sandbox environment. After successfully completing this testing, Grantek directed the Quality Server to the manufacturer's SAP ECC 6.0 QA environment.

Finally, Grantek directed the Quality Server to the manufacturer's SAP R/3 4.6C QA environment. Once the updated quality server was verified to be fully functional with both SAP R/3 4.6C and SAP ECC 6.0, it could be used in place of the production servers, while they were taken offline for updates and testing. Next, Grantek updated the production servers and directed them to the Apotex SAP ECC 6.0 QA environment. Grantek then directed the production servers to the manufacturer's SAP R/3 4.6C QA environment.

Healthy results

The pharmaceutical company and Grantek team completed a thorough end-to-end test of all facets of the MES solution. The SAP upgrade to SAP ECC 6.0 was a success. The company scheduled a time to perform the upgrade, and no further work was required - Factor/Talk migrated from SAP R3 4.6C to SAP ECC 6.0 seamlessly.

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