With global warming presenting serious threats to human health, leading biopharmaceutical company Pfizer is on a mission to reduce its environmental impact and achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. Keeping critical logistics, business and financial processes running smoothly is key to meeting these targets, and a recent move to SAP S/4HANA presented an opportunity for the company to make new sustainability gains while enhancing IT services.

When Pfizer and Erhart founded Charles Pfizer & Company 175 years ago, the two cousins could not have imagined the major medical breakthroughs their company would go on to make. Throughout the years, the company has grown tremendously both organically and through acquisition, such as with the significant 2009 merger with Wyeth Corporation. Famous for its pioneering drug discovery, the company also maintains relentless focus on distribution excellence, supported by streamlined operational and financial processes.

The corporate acquisition path, though, resulted in a wide variety of business systems and software, which presented significant challenges for global reporting, and produced significant administration, maintenance and support costs.

Scott Groth, Director, ERP Platform Engineering & Emerging Technologies at Pfizer, comments, “The Wyeth acquisition brought SAP applications into the combined business, which from that point on we chose as our strategic platform. Even so, there were pockets of solutions, so to speak, throughout the globe and, ultimately, we wanted to move to a single, unified, architecture to enable a single point of truth for running and reporting on the business. We keep this operating model as our North Star to align our objectives.”

However, the existing SAP solutions and infrastructure also brought a degree of technical debt, and the company started a global transformation program to become more current. For the supporting infrastructure, Pfizer selected IBM Power as its mission-critical server platform for SAP applications and their supporting databases, as well as related business systems for track-and-trace, invoicing and more.

“We completed a detailed assessment of possible technology platforms and made our strategic platform decision for IBM Power in 2009, and we have never looked back,” comments Scott Groth. “To operate a single global ERP instance, you need a highly robust platform able to support very complex applications. Reliability, availability, serviceability, flexibility and similar strengths were all traits we needed to be ingrained into the platform—and IBM Power provided all of these.”

Pfizer was an early adopter of SAP HANA database technologies, running it on SUSE Linux® for Enterprise Server in virtual machines on IBM Power. When SAP introduced SAP S/4HANA and the scheduled retirement of older SAP applications, the Pfizer team looked again at its infrastructure strategy, such as the possibility of all-cloud operations, hybrid cloud or an on-premises approach.

With decades of highly detailed customization, extracting and migrating individual applications from Pfizer’s very tightly integrated SAP solutions to cloud services posed considerable challenges. The sheer size of Pfizer’s operations would require a very large number of x86 virtual servers in typical public cloud hyperscalers, which would impose a significant management and administration overhead on the digital teams.

“Following a rigorous comparison of hyperscaler-based cloud operations on x86 servers and an on-premises IBM Power infrastructure, it was a clear decision to stay on premises,” says Scott. “Because of the size limits of x86 servers, scaling up to handle our volume of work would require possibly five times as many servers when compared with IBM Power. Adding servers implies taking a scale-out approach, which in turn means clustering those servers, itself adding to administration overhead. For Pfizer, the advantage of the IBM Power platform is that it provides the ability to scale up, by increasing the capacity of a single virtual machine to run very large SAP workloads. The scale up approach delivered by IBM Power enables us to manage greater workload with the least complexity.”

Pfizer, therefore, chose to move from its existing IBM Power8® infrastructure to IBM Power10, and migrated its existing applications and databases in an 18-month program. The company’s SAP solutions now run on just six IBM Power10 systems, configured as three servers in two geographically separated data centers to provide resilience and disaster recovery. Pfizer uses IBM PowerVM® software to manage over 500 virtual servers that host production, development and test environments that support all of Pfizer’s commercial, finance, procurement and manufacturing operations.

Scott Groth comments, “Our Go-Live was truly amazing; the star was actually IBM Power 10 – and I’m not just saying that. The production environment performed optimally, if not exceptionally. We achieved over 160,000 input/output operations per second, which allowed us to export our ECC in record time. We overachieved the data migration by over 11.5 hours, and our data migration forecast was 54 hours, and we realized this phase in 42.5 hours.”

A total of around 50,000 users access a host of SAP applications running on the Power platform, including SAP S4/HANA, SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP governance, risk and compliance solutions, SAP Master Data Management, and SAP Fiori, with around 14 TB of HANA data available in SAP Business Warehouse on HANA on Power.

Taking advantage of automation and virtualization

With large numbers of virtual servers to manage, Pfizer deploys Red Hat® Ansible® Automation to accelerate provisioning and configuration wherever possible, as Scott Groth explains: “With Red Hat Ansible Automation, things that previously could take us a week now take us just a couple of hours. Being able to apply these techniques offers a significant management advantage when using the IBM Power platform.”

Pfizer takes maximum advantage of the virtualization capabilities of IBM Power10, deploying IBM® Power® Private Cloud with Dynamic Capacity, formerly Power Enterprise Pools. This technology enables the creation of a centralized compute, memory and storage resource using the capacity of all servers in the group. The model enables resources to be automatically applied and charged for on a minute-of-usage basis. From a single interface, each application can be assigned the optimal configuration – including dynamic adjustment depending on demand – to help ensure the maximum possible performance and efficiency, as well as providing a flexible, scalable way to manage mission-critical services.

“With IBM Power Private Cloud and Dynamic Capacity there is no need to micromanage resources, because there are no limits on what you can run on any server,” explains Scott Groth. “Whatever is in your pool spans across all your servers, even across data centers, which gives you the freedom to run workload wherever you want. IBM Power provides a very easy and efficient way to manage and optimize resources.”

In addition, the Pfizer corporation is very conscious of its strategic commitments to sustainability, and IBM Power10 solutions fit beautifully with those goals, as Scott Groth explains: “Virtualization enables Pfizer to run its extensive range of SAP and supporting solutions on a compact server footprint, with reduced carbon emissions that align well with the company’s commitments to sustainability. Compared with previous systems, Power10 servers can be up to twice as energy-efficient, while potentially delivering up to double the compute scalability.”

Pfizer aims to run on electricity generated from renewable resources by 2030, and reducing power consumption by consolidating to fewer servers will play a key role in achieving that ambition, by taking advantage of the ability to run multiple operating systems and workloads. As Scott Groth remarks, “You name it—HANA, ABAP, Java, Oracle—they’re all running on a single physical Power10 server, and we can do this because the platform is so robust and runs anything we throw at it.”

Optimizing migration and operations

With the migration of existing applications to Power10 complete, Pfizer has transformed all its SAP applications to SAP S/4HANA solutions. In this 18-month program, Pfizer engaged IBM Consulting® in conjunction with Schneider-Neureither & Partner (SNP), a systems integrator and an IBM Business Partner. IBM Consulting works with SNP as a team, using SNP’s CrystalBridge software to deliver the IBM Rapid Move methodology, designed specifically to implement SAP S/4HANA transformation programs. Services from IBM Consulting included data migration, proof of concept, and in-depth business process analysis.

SNP assisted Pfizer with data management, for example helping to reduce a very large SAP R/3 on AnyDB system down to a manageable SAP S/4HANA system. The source applications contain around 27 years of historic data from business units and companies that Pfizer divested years ago. Working with SNP, Pfizer deployed selective data migration, helping to optimize the future S/4HANA applications.

The program is already delivering direct, tangible benefits. For example, Pfizer has cut 9 ledgers, reducing from 15 to 4, a 73% reduction, by implementing SAP Universal Journal, reducing complexity and eliminating duplication. Similarly, the combination of increased system performance from Power10 and the migration from SAP ECC 6.0 to SAP S/4 HANA is delivering a 5% improvement in order-to-cash cycle time.

While the Pfizer team noticed immediate performance improvements with IBM Power10, the benefits will become truly apparent over a longer timescale. For example, Pfizer plans to streamline company month-end closing processes, deploy SAP Extended Warehouse Management and SAP S/4HANA for advanced available-to-promise, and roll out SAP Fiori applications.

Scott Groth continues, “We are always looking for better ways to do things, and our move from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA means that for new projects we forecast cost avoidance of 20%, because the capabilities are already there.”

Aware of the business risk when implementing a global project to 130 countries and 37 manufacturing plants that operate 24x7, Pfizer’s first stage was to complete mandatory items and then move forward with optional enhancements.

“It is very disruptive to impose downtime on manufacturing, which must switch to their business continuity plans. For that reason, we needed the most optimal, performant environment to minimize the impact, and a key capability of the Power10 platform is its ability get up and running as quickly as possible,” says Scott Groth.

Senior Director of Digital Finance Solutions and SAP S/4HANA Program Manager, Raj Hase, adds, “At every point we wanted to minimize risk, and our strategic partner IBM Consulting was instrumental in helping us plan for success. From the initial discovery and proof of concept work for the migration to Power10, IBM brought in-depth SAP S/4HANA expertise to the table and helped us understand what it takes to get to the objective. We relied heavily on IBM Consulting to work closely with our business teams to plan out the critical actions and help us with mock cutovers and the migration itself.”

Scott Groth adds, “We understand that no platform or application is perfect, and that there will be challenges and obstacles that could derail a successful implementation. The partnership with Pfizer and IBM Consulting provided the highest value in this entire story.”