Greenfield SAP Implementation for a Pharma Distribution Unit

A pharmaceutical distribution company was launching a new business unit and needed an ERP system built from scratch, no legacy setup, no old data, just a blank slate. We handled the greenfield SAP implementation to get their core processes up and running, while also making sure the new unit could talk to the parent company’s existing SAP environment without anyone having to enter the same data twice.

Table of Content

Challenges
Our Solutions
Results
Service Used

The Challenge

Starting fresh sounds simple, but it comes with its own set of problems:

  • Every process, procurement, warehouse management, sales, batch tracking, had to be designed from zero, since there was nothing to migrate from
  • The parent company already ran its own SAP setup for the main business, and the new unit couldn’t operate as an island, inventory movements, intercompany billing, and consolidated reporting all needed to connect back eventually
  • Pharma comes with regulatory baggage that doesn’t forgive shortcuts, batch and lot tracking, expiry management, and compliance reporting needed to be right from day one. The client had actually run into this problem before at a sister company, where compliance reporting got bolted on after go-live and caused months of cleanup
  • They had roughly 10 weeks to get the new unit operational, timed to a product launch that wasn’t moving

The hard part wasn’t just building something new from scratch, it was making sure that new system could eventually plug into an existing brownfield SAP environment without turning into two systems that each needed separate babysitting.

Our Solution

We started with process mapping, not configuration, spending the first couple of weeks with the client’s operations team walking through how procurement, warehousing, and sales should actually work for this unit, rather than just copying the parent company’s setup wholesale, since a fair bit of it didn’t apply.

From there, we built out:

  • Core procurement, inventory, and sales modules configured specifically for pharma distribution, including batch/lot tracking and expiry date management baked in from the start
  • Compliance-related fields and validations set up early, so regulatory reporting wasn’t something scrambled together after go-live
  • An integration layer connecting the new system to the parent company’s existing SAP environment, so intercompany transactions and consolidated reporting could happen without manual re-entry on either side
  • A phased go-live inventory and procurement went live first, sales and reporting followed about three weeks later once the foundation held up under real usage

The integration turned out to be the harder half of the project. The parent’s system had years of customizations layered on top of it, and a chunk of those didn’t map cleanly onto the new unit’s fresh setup. We ended up writing custom logic just to bridge that gap, rather than dragging all of the parent’s old workarounds into a system that didn’t need them.

Results

The new unit went live in 9 weeks, a week ahead of the product launch deadline. Batch and expiry tracking worked correctly from day one, so unlike the sister company’s earlier experience, there was no post-launch scramble to fix compliance gaps. Intercompany data now flows between the new system and the parent’s SAP environment automatically, cutting out what used to be a manual, error-prone reconciliation step.

A handful of intercompany reports still need manual adjustment before month-end sign-off  a few edge cases from the parent’s older customizations haven’t been fully mapped into the integration yet. The team is working through those gradually instead of holding up the rest of the rollout over it.

Tech stack we used

AI & automation solutions

Frontend: ReactJs

Backend: NodeJs

Mobile: Flutter

Database & infrastructure

Database: MongoDB & Redis

Cloud/Hosting: AWS

Other Tools/Integrations: Flolive