From research to production — nearly 60% less manual tracking effort

Initial situation.

A biopharmaceutical company at the transition from pure research and development to its own production works differently from one that only develops. This company was making exactly that move — and ran into a gap that is typical of this growth phase: tracking products across the value chain was done entirely by hand. No automated process existed. What is still manageable in the development phase becomes a structural risk once you produce in-house — for delivery reliability, for transparency in the supply chain, and for the effort tied up week after week in manual tracking.

This is precisely where what we call the ERP implementation gap begins. A 2025 MIT study shows that, despite considerable investment, around 95 per cent of corporate technology initiatives generate no measurable impact on results. Our experience from more than 30 years of ERP consulting: this risk is greatest in growth and transition phases — when a company expands its business model before its processes have grown with it.

Strategic approach.

The obvious route would have been to buy an ERP system that offers "product tracking" as a feature. A vendor-driven selection would have delivered exactly that — a system, but not a process. Because the bottleneck was never the missing software; it was that the process the software could have mapped simply did not yet exist.

This is the heart of our principle "Organisation before IT": an ERP system can only automate what has first been defined as a process. Reverse the order and you invest in technology, then wonder why the productivity never comes. The implementation gap does not open when the software contract is signed — it opens before that, in the undefined process.

The approach therefore followed a clear sequence:

1. Vendor-neutral ERP selection. Requirements from the future operating model — research, development and production — were gathered systematically and the decision secured against transparent criteria, free of vendor interests.
2. Joint process design. The automated tracking process was designed together with the company — not imposed as a consultant's template, but built along the real flows between development, production and logistics. This joint design is the reason the process is actually lived after go-live.
3. Implementation in the system. Only after the process design was it built into the selected ERP — software as a tool for a defined workflow, not a hope for an undefined one.

• "Organisation before IT" — process design before system configuration
• Vendor-neutral ERP selection, secured against transparent criteria and free of vendor interests
• Tracking process designed jointly with the people who run it daily — so it is lived after go-live
• Nearly 60% less manual product-tracking effort
• The implementation gap opens before the contract, in the undefined process — greatest risk in growth and transition phases

Transparency note: The new integrated ERP system is live and has been accepted. We are monitoring the target corridors and will publish the actual figures after twelve months as a follow-up to this case study.