Enable Injections Shares Its SAP S/4HANA Transformation Story—and Navisite’s Role in the Journey
No matter the industry, business size or long-term goals, today’s organizations often have one major thing in common: they’re looking to achieve new business opportunities, higher productivity, increased agility and an exceptional customer service experience—all while reducing risks and expenses along the way. To meet these goals, organizations are increasingly recognizing the criticality of modernizing their digital core—and for many, that means implementing an SAP S/4HANA transformation to leverage next-gen cloud technologies and accelerate digital transformation.
Our customers are no exception.
That’s why we recently participated in a webinar with one of our customers, Enable Injections—to share their own real-world digital transformation story about how they leveraged S/4HANA to seamlessly integrate business operations and make aggressive growth goals a reality. During the webinar, Enable Injections detailed their S/4HANA transformation—including the company’s reasons for choosing SAP and Navisite as its trusted advisor, its phased approach to a greenfield S/4HANA implementation and the benefits they realized since completing the project.
In this blog post, we share the highlights of Enable Injections’ digital transformation story—and how you can start building your own roadmap to S/4HANA to achieve business-critical goals and future-proof your organization.
Business Growth Precipitates IT Change
Enable Injections is a medical device manufacturer that is revolutionizing patient care and comfort with its wearable drug delivery solution. Its one-of-a-kind technology, enFuseTM, provides patients with a safe, convenient and cost-effective alternative to IV fluid administration—instead, enabling them to self-administer treatments outside of a clinical facility.
Because there are no other drug delivery devices that can accomplish what Enable’s solutions can, there is a significant market opportunity for the company. Just how much of an addressable market is there for the taking? The global biologics market is projected to reach $597 billion in 2028—that’s a growth of more than $298 billion compared to 2020.
To capture this market share, Enable knew they had to put an IT infrastructure in place that would allow them to easily and quickly scale to support rapid expansion. They also needed to prove to potential pharmaceutical partners that the company has what it takes to deliver safe drugs and continuously follow Life Sciences best practices (like meeting FDA compliance requirements and approvals) amidst large-scale growth. Tim Flaherty, Enable Injections’ executive vice president and chief financial officer, knew a modern enterprise resource planning (ERP) system would play a major role in achieving these goals.
“We build our product specific for the pharmaceutical companies. With these pharmaceutical companies, we’re talking miracle biologic drugs for Crohn’s disease, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s disease, blood disorders,” Flaherty said during the webinar. “So, the market gets big quick. In addition, the pharmaceutical companies are looking for compliance, best practices and scalability. We had to start looking at the ERP landscape.”
Flaherty and his team ultimately chose SAP S/4HANA as its core ERP system to gain the scalability needed to support rapid growth following FDA regulatory approval and its transformation to a commercialized business. With SAP, they could execute a phased implementation, bringing on the most critical modules at the right time throughout the transformation journey—and then easily integrating them with existing systems.
Selecting a Long-term S/4HANA Transformation Partner
With SAP S/4HANA selected as Enable Injections’ ERP of choice, the next major decision was choosing the right partner to help them execute the implementation. And this wasn’t a decision that Flaherty took lightly.
“I’ve been through quite a few implementations in my career, and a partner can definitely make or break an implementation. A partner is as important, if not more important, than the system itself,” Flaherty said in the webinar.
The company evaluated several providers, but Flaherty said that Navisite emerged as the clear winner for several reasons:
- Expertise and experience: Navisite’s experts possess deep knowledge and extensive experience across all types of S/4HANA implementations (like Greenfield, Brownfield and Selective Data Transition).
- Reputation as a trusted advisor: Flaherty says Navisite served as a “trusted advisor” from the start, providing recommendations on ways Enable Injections could finance company systems, the type of implementation to pursue and which modules to bring on at each point in the transformation journey.
- Locality: Navisite has a presence in Cincinnati, where the company is headquartered, which allows for face-to-face accessibility, whenever needed.
A Phased Approach to S/4HANA Transformation
Enable Injections began its S/4HANA transformation in 2017, working closely with Navisite to prioritize an implementation roadmap that outlined the right technical modules to implement at each stage of the journey. Flaherty notes that the first phase of the project focused on deploying the SAP FICO module for financial controlling. Previously, Enable Injections was using QuickBooks, so Flaherty and his team partnered with Navisite to import the company’s QuickBooks data to SAP FICO. With Navisite’s support, within three months, the company was up and running with the new financial module.
Over the course of the next four years, the company proceeded to add new modules as business requirements dictated, including the implementation of SAP Sales and Distribution, Production Planning, Materials Management, SuccessFactors, Document Management, Plant Maintenance and Product Lifecycle Management.
Flaherty says that this year, the company is focusing on expanding existing modules and incorporating additional solutions, such as SAP Analytics Cloud and Extended Warehouse Management.
Preparing the Commercialization Roadmap and Building a Future-Proof Business
With S/4HANA at its digital core, Enable Injections is able to fully integrate all of these different modules across the entire business system—so they work collectively to drive business operations today while supporting the needs of tomorrow. As the company prepares for commercialization, Flaherty knows that S/4HANA has the company covered from a technical perspective—giving Enable Injections the systems and scalability it needs to accommodate rapid growth over the next few years as it brings its groundbreaking technology to market.
Additionally, Flaherty knows that just because the bulk of the S/4HANA implementation phase has been completed, Navisite is still by its side as a long-term partner, helping it continually optimize its S/4HANA implementation and meet its business goals.
To learn more about how Navisite helped Enable Injections throughout its S/4HANA journey, read our full case study, “Medical Device Manufacturer Enables Rapid Scalability and Innovation with SAP S/4HANA Implementation.”
On the path to digital transformation? Discover more SAP S/4HANA resources for your journey.
Megan is the Content Marketing Manager at Navisite with more than 10 years of experience helping brands discover and tell their stories. From working at a global non-profit organization to boutique marketing agencies in Chicago, she champions the power of storytelling across all industries.