SAP in the pharmaceutical industry

Farmacol S.A., a distributor of pharmaceutical products, has implemented the SAP integrated financial management system across its entire capital group.

– We were looking for an integrated tool that would allow us to collect data from the group’s companies in a single system. We wanted to reach for a solution that was proven not only in Poland but also on the global market. The choice of the SAP system also has the advantage for us that we can not only implement the software but also benefit from the knowledge of consultants in creating a modern accounting standard – says Bogusław Kobic, Head of IT and project manager at Farmacol S.A.

Farmacol has implemented the core financial management functionalities of the mySAP ERP Financials application. These are the modules: Financial Accounting (FI), Asset Accounting (FI AA), Treasury (TR), and Controlling (CO). A very important element of the project was the creation of automatic interfaces to the company’s own logistics system, covering both the transfer of documents and settlements between the systems.
– Due to the huge scale of the company’s operations – hundreds of thousands of transactions per month – we encountered difficulties of an accounting nature. We were actually preparing two interfaces. One for transferring data on warehouse movements, and the other registers complex settlements, which are also sent to the logistics system. Preparing the interfaces required adapting both systems: SAP and the logistics system authored by Polsoft. The interface is configurable, meaning the client can continue to map operations occurring in the logistics process to the SAP system – says Waldemar Kaduk, project manager at IDS Scheer Polska.

The implementation work for the financial management system at Farmacol lasted 9 months. The system is used by 100 users in several locations: the Katowice headquarters and business units in Szczecin, Warsaw, and Wrocław. As Bogusław Kobic admits, the goals defined before the decision to implement the integrated financial management system were achieved: data consolidation, the possibility of standardizing certain reporting areas, as well as incoming information.

Farmacol plans further centralization of accounting functions and the implementation of a data warehouse, enabling more precise analyses and forecasts.