SPIMACO: Building the future of pharmaceuticals with SAP on Google Cloud
About Spimaco
Founded in 1986, the Saudi Pharmaceutical Industries and Medical Appliances Corporation (SPIMACO) has grown to become one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in Saudi Arabia and one of the largest in the Middle East and North Africa. Today, the company develops, produces, and distributes more than 2 billion units of high-quality pharmaceutical products a year in 16 countries.
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Contact usSPIMACO uses SAP on Google Cloud to simplify its enterprise resource planning, drive efficiency, and build a cloud-native foundation for sustainable growth and data-driven decision making.
Google Cloud results
- Unifies 11 critical ERP integrations onto a single platform for improved reliability and simplified operations management
- Maximizes agility and sustainability with clear visibility, built-in carbon footprint monitoring and the flexibility to scale on demand
- Accelerates innovation and new projects with improved connectivity and access to data for the whole organization
- Enables a stable, cloud-native platform for innovation in areas, such as Internet of Things and Industry 4.0
Slashes provisioning time from 3-6 months to 3-4 days
In an increasingly changing world, getting access to healthcare and medicine is more important than ever. Since it was established in 1986, the Saudi Pharmaceutical Industries and Medical Appliances Corporation (SPIMACO) has played its part by developing, producing, and distributing high quality, affordable generic drugs throughout the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the surrounding region.
Today, the company manufactures and distributes 2 billion units across 190 product lines a year and has expanded its operations across 16 countries. Aiming to become the leading pharmaceutical company in the Middle East and North Africa, SPIMACO has focused on innovation and technology. "We have invested heavily in automation and robotics across our production facilities to help expand our range and keep up with demand," says Mansour Alrebdi, Business Services Development Director at SPIMACO.
"From an IT perspective, we want to enable profitable and sustainable growth through automation and data-driven decision making. That's why we embarked on a strategy of wide scale digital transformation across all areas of SPIMACO. We took our first step on that journey with Google Cloud."
—Sajan Nair, Group IT Executive Director, SPIMACOSuch a remarkable rise, however, has come with a cost. As the company grew, it placed increasingly large demands on its legacy on-premises IT infrastructure, which began to show its age. Rather than simply adding to its existing resources, SPIMACO chose to build a whole new solution with Google Cloud.
"From an IT perspective, we want to enable profitable and sustainable growth through automation and data-driven decision making," explains Sajan Nair, Group IT Executive Director at SPIMACO. "That's why we embarked on a strategy of wide scale digital transformation across all areas of SPIMACO. We took our first step on that journey with Google Cloud."
Unlocking the potential of SAP
SPIMACO kicked off its digital transformation journey with a survey of its existing technological environment, beginning with SAP. The company was running an older version of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that was due to reach its end of maintenance period by 2021.
"SAP is absolutely critical for our entire organization from laboratory management to manufacturing to corporate activities," says Nair. "Over the years, SPIMACO had acquired 11 different SAP integrations which were all functioning, but badly documented and separated across regions and data centers. This severely impacted our backup strategy and how we managed these processes."
As the SAP components came to the end of their life cycle, Nair and his team saw that the required upgrade was simply too advanced to run on SPIMACO's existing on-premises hardware. "With on-premises infrastructure, this became a vicious cycle," he says. "The software needed upgrading, which required a new operating system, which required a whole new infrastructure."
Technical excellence made easy, regulatory compliance simplified
SPIMACO decided to break free of this cycle by completely rebuilding its SAP solution in the cloud, designed for growth, stability and security. In 2021, the company ran a six month trial of several cloud providers. As a manufacturer of pharmaceuticals, however, SPIMACO had to find a solution that could not only accomplish its technical goals but also adhere to the company's complex regulatory requirements.
"We wanted a solution that would enable us to adhere to Good Manufacturing Practice and comply with regulations from the Saudi Food and Drug Administration and the National Cyber Security Agency regulations," says Alrebdi. "Of all the solutions we looked at, only Google Cloud, with its presence in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, could fulfill the technical ambitions and regulatory requirements that we needed."
After making its decision, SPIMACO worked closely with Google Cloud to educate its team and make the most of its new infrastructure. "The Google Cloud team helped us to change not just our technology, but our culture," says Nair. "They offered us in-depth workshops, free learning tools, and hands-on testing so that we could learn every aspect of the Google Cloud environment. This wasn't just a technical contractor coming in for a week, and leaving. It was the complete package."
"The visibility we have with SAP on Google Cloud is something we didn't have before. Just one example is how we deal with backups. Using Looker, we've been able to visualize our entire backup strategy and execution on a single dashboard that we check every morning."
—Sajan Nair, Group IT Executive Director, SPIMACOAs a result of this close working relationship, the SPIMACO team managed to handle the entire migration to Google Cloud internally in just a few months. With SAP on Google Cloud, SPIMACO has unified its ERP integrations onto a single platform, designed to perform at scale. Previously, with its SAP solutions running in different regions, backups were separated and difficult to keep track of. Using Google Cloud Storage, the company is able to access all of its SAP backups at will from a secure location.
In the Google Cloud environment, SAP also connects seamlessly with data analytics tools, such as Looker, which SPIMACO uses to gain unprecedented insights into its operations. "The visibility we have with SAP on Google Cloud is something we didn't have before," says Nair. "Just one example is how we deal with backups. Using Looker, we've been able to visualize our entire backup strategy and execution on a single dashboard that we check every morning."
SAP on Google Cloud was only the first step for SPIMACO. The company has since gone on to migrate many other important workloads to Google Compute Engine instances, including its manufacturing execution system, laboratory information management platform, content management system, and more. "With Google Compute Engine, we can provision new instances very quickly," says Nair. "It has made it very easy for us to rebuild our systems in the cloud and accelerated our digital transformation."
Unlocking agility for enterprise scale operations
In the two years since it started working with Google Cloud, the ability to work at speed and at scale has had a clear impact on SPIMACO's operations. On its previous infrastructure, provisioning new environments and hardware took between around three to six months depending on chip availability. With Google Cloud, that provisioning time is down to three or four days.
As impressive as that is as a technical measure of performance, it really means that SPIMACO can get much more done than it could before. "The agility we have gained with Google Cloud helps us to innovate faster, develop more mature products and has given us a great competitive advantage," says Alrebdi. "We were simply not able to roll out this many projects at this kind of speed with on-premises infrastructure."
Not only has this agility helped SPIMACO grow, it has also helped it keep costs to a minimum. Instead of sinking money and staff resources into acquiring, configuring and maintaining on-premises servers, the company only has to pay for the compute resources it uses and abstracts away the operations management. SPIMACO can also continually monitor its workloads and adjust them accordingly, for example, shutting them down on weekends and evenings for added efficiency.
"It's been such a huge change, that it's very hard to make direct cost comparisons with the infrastructure we had before," says Alrebdi. "What is clear is that the transparency and flexibility to upscale and downscale with Google Cloud has made us far more efficient with our technology costs."
As a carbon neutral technology provider, Google Cloud has also become a core part of SPIMACO's sustainability efforts. The visibility that enables time and cost savings on the platform also allows the company to stay energy efficient and built-in dashboards help monitor its carbon footprint.
Cloud native, connected, and ready for the future
At its core, however, SPIMACO's migration to the cloud is about more than achieving efficiency gains and technical improvements. It's about building a whole new cloud-native, data-driven culture for the company. The technological connectivity is mirrored at a larger scale in the way that different regions and departments work more closely and more efficiently together. For example, operations across 16 countries can be visualized, monitored, and optimized on a single dashboard, which would have been impossible before.
"From a business application perspective, the IT department has gone from being a bottleneck to an accelerator of new projects," says Alrebdi. "It's like Google Cloud is an ocean. We can just dive in and pick whatever we want."
Following the successful migration, SPIMACO has its eye on the next series of ambitious goals with Google Cloud. The company is currently working to upgrade to SAP S/4HANA to help accelerate its growth without increasing complexity. Its Research and Development team is also working with BigQuery and Vertex AI Search to mine insights from more than 50 million records of global patent data.
"From a business application perspective, the IT department has gone from being a bottleneck to an accelerator of new projects. It's like Google Cloud is an ocean. We can just dive in and pick whatever we want."
—Mansour Alrebdi, Business Services Development Director, SPIMACOAs well as expanding the business, SPIMACO is keen to build on its previous work to introduce automation and robotics to its production facilities, following the globally recognized Smart Industry Readiness Index (SIRI) framework. Using the range of industry solutions provided by Google Cloud, the company's manufacturing arm is finding ways to connect its factory machines and robots and explore the potential of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industry 4.0 with powerful data analytics and machine learning.
"We're keen to leverage the capabilities of Google Cloud to meet the SIRI framework goals with technology like artificial intelligence and machine learning," says Alrebdi. "We're confident that we have the right platform to face the challenges of the future."
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About Spimaco
Founded in 1986, the Saudi Pharmaceutical Industries and Medical Appliances Corporation (SPIMACO) has grown to become one of the leading pharmaceutical companies in Saudi Arabia and one of the largest in the Middle East and North Africa. Today, the company develops, produces, and distributes more than 2 billion units of high-quality pharmaceutical products a year in 16 countries.