Founded in 1930, Darnitsa is one of Ukraine’s leading manufacturers of medical products with an ambition to expand globally. Committed to disrupting the pharmaceutical sector, the company engaged Microsoft partner Infopulse to design a holistic digital transformation strategy using Microsoft Office 365 as a core platform. Following the successful integration of company-wide collaboration tools, Darnitsa implemented a full-scale migration of SAP on HANA to Azure, leading to 60 percent infrastructure costs savings and boosted productivity across the company.
Darnitsa started its digital transformation journey by implementing Microsoft Office 365. Critical for its adoption was to show how the solution could help employees become more productive and achieve full ownership over their projects, a value entrenched in Darnitsa’s vision. “Digital technologies are about more than implementing products or buying equipment; they’re about switching mindsets,” explains Romanenko. “We wanted to give people freedom in communication, data exchange, and daily tasks execution. Freedom to make themselves more effective,” he adds.
As first users emerged, benefitting from anytime, anywhere, any device access to critical tools, others followed, gradually embracing Microsoft Planner for project management, and Microsoft Teams and OneDrive for highly secure, cloud-based collaboration and file sharing. “With Office 365, we have taken the way of working to another level,” sums up Romanenko.
SAP on Azure for boosted productivity and lowers costs
Darnitsa then migrated its on-premises SAP on HANA system to the Azure cloud platform. Romanenko comments on the decision. “Flexibility, reliability, and cost efficiency—these, as well as its simplicity and ease of implementation, were the drivers that brought us to Azure. And Infopulse did an excellent job helping us with the full migration.”
“With Azure cloud, we found a more sustainable, efficient, and profitable way of doing business,” says Romanenko. Indeed, it takes minutes instead of days to deliver internal IT services. The consolidation of data in the cloud, rationalizing and removing redundancies between the different data sets, helped reduce the database size by four times. “This cleanup cut our storage costs by 60 percent and shaved 50 percent off the total cost of ownership,” Romanenko explains. Having a cloud-based infrastructure allows Darnitsa to maintain business continuity and saves time to the IT team for strategic projects. “We’ve also confirmed an overall 30 percent IT system performance boost,” adds Romanenko.
Encouraged by these impressive outcomes, Darnitsa recently introduced its Azure-based SAP information system, becoming one of the country’s first pharmaceutical companies to launch an electronic document flow to create medicines master files. Darnitsa is also exploring Microsoft’s business intelligence and data management technologies, and the use of AI and Azure IoT Hub solutions.
“Flexibility, reliability, and cost efficiency—these, as well as its simplicity and ease of implementation, were the drivers that brought us to Azure.”
Andriy Romanenko: CIO, Darnitsa
Source: Top Ukrainian pharma moves SAP to Azure to boost productivity and save costs
