Kela Health - SAP Integration Suite

In recent years Belgium-based Kela has grown into a specialist in the welfare of humans and animals. The company specializes in developing and marketing pharmaceutical products and food supplements.

Recently, Kela decided to outsource part of its logistics, including all warehouse activities, such as storage, picking, and packing its goods, to logistics company H. Essers. In addition, H. Essers, which has services and a specialized hub for the pharmaceutical sector, takes care of the direct distribution to Kela’s end customers, mainly pharmacists.

To support these operations and related processes, H. Essers’ software had to be seamlessly integrated with Kela’s SAP system. Alluvion collaborated with Quinaptis on this project. Quinaptis was asked to oversee this project and take care of the functional and technical parts of the integration. Alluvion did the interfacing part on SAP BTP.

Main functional challenges and solution

To support its strong growth, Kela has the SAP ERP ECC 6.0 in place, with various SAP modules such as Sales and Distribution (SD), Materials Management (MM), Quality management (QM), and warehouse management (LE-WM).

This enables the company to flexibly manage its inbound, storage, and outbound flows. Key elements in these flows include guaranteeing full traceability of all Kela goods through all these flows and timely and efficient outbound and inbound movements.

The cooperation with H. Essers, initially mainly for warehouse-related logistics services, is another step for Kela to support its growth and further optimize its business processes.

To make the outsourcing successful, the systems and applications of both companies needed to be connected without disrupting operations. The objectives and challenges of this project included:

• Aligning the processes of Kela with the interfaces and processes of H. Essers,
• Meeting a hard and fixed deadline to enable the contractually agreed specifics of the collaboration,
• Maintaining full traceability within both internal and external systems, and
• Supporting a smooth (physical) migration to H. Essers.

In addition, the existing LE-WM solution supporting the warehouse had to remain active for some time to facilitate the physical movement of inventory.

Goods are transferred to H. Essers with a Stock Transport Order (STO) flow. The most efficient way to do so turned out to set up an SAP STO flow. Quinaptis realized this in just one day.

The rest of the functional SAP customization was set up by Quinaptis in the time frame of two weeks.

For specific scenarios such as subcontracting, handling unit integration and QM integration, finetuning and development enabled proper integration with H. Essers’ software.

With the support of a strong KELA team and H. Essers warehouse integration team, the fixed deadline was met, and the go-live was a success.

Key technical challenges and solution

The existing Kela system landscape

At the start of the project, Kela had no third-party integrations or external applications. The essential business processes were set up in the SAP ECC 6.0 back-end system. A new integration platform had to be defined to exchange business data between Kela and H. Essers.

The architecture of the solution

The solution architecture needed to take the current landscape of Kela and the to-be solution into account to meet the full scope of the project. As the enterprise architecture was not that comprehensive, multiple platforms could be used to meet the requirement to seamlessly integrate and communicate with external parties. However, due to Kela’s and Alluvion's visions of being future-proof in digitalization and cloud, SAP’s Integration Suite basic edition was elected to be the integration platform of choice. This finalizes the hybrid solution architecture of the project: Kela’s ECC on-premise system on the one side and SAP’s cloud integration solution on the other side.

The scope of the project

The scope of the project includes the exchange of various business documents. These are first translated into Intermediate Documents (IDocs) and forwarded to the Cloud Integration platform. They are then converted into the desired customer formats and pushed to the customer’s server using an SFTP connection.

After the customer processes the files, confirmation messages are created, which in turn are retrieved, transformed in the Cloud Integration platform, and forwarded to Kela’s SAP ECC system, where they are automatically processed.

Finally, there is an exchange of report files and informative mail processing to ensure maximum processing. If there are interruptions, the responsible IT agents are immediately notified with all the detailed information in order to take the necessary actions.

About Kela Health

Kela was founded in 1941 as a Belgian family business. They have built expertise in every aspect of marketing pharmaceutical products and dietary supplements. Their experience comes from well-targeted hires and an organic recruitment policy to build expert teams in every area of R&D, manufacturing, global registrations, marketing, sales and exports.

Their teams develop and improve pharmaceutical products that meet the requirements of different animal species and the agricultural challenges in global animal health. The human health portfolio is focused on serving the Belgian and Luxembourg markets and is increasingly focused on folic acid-based specialities.

KELA HEALTH

Sint Lenaartseweg 48

2320 HOOGSTRATEN

www.kela.health

+32 3 340 04 11

About Quinaptis

Quinaptis improves the supply chain experience of companies across the globe. They combine a broad, strategic enterprise architecture perspective with a profound knowledge of logistic processes and technologies. They provide consulting and support in the field of logistics and SAP expertise to help you during the implementation of your SAP logistic software and inject innovation into your organization.

The world and supply chains in particular have been more disrupted in the past years than ever before. This brings new challenges, which we tackle in three different, but related domains. The first pillar focuses on business insights, where we take a data-driven approach to look at how business is operating and what will bring the most value. The second pillar is all about the operational side of logistics with solutions like SAP’s EWM, TM, YL and LBN and others. The third pillar looks at innovation, which is more and more driven by technology. We work with augmented reality, and automation (both machines and software),… to support humans, eliminate mundane tasks and improve quality.

Quinaptis

Neerlandweg 16

2610 ANTWERPEN

www.quinaptis.com

+32 3 386 03 75

About Alluvion

We are an international team of SAP master data experts dedicated to achieve and maintain reliable data.

We accomplish this through both advisory and implementation. We excel in Master Data Management from a profound understanding of this complex domain (as well in product, technology, business processes, and methodology). 

What sets us apart is our pragmatic approach and the ability to deliver rapid, tangible results.

For questions or information on this topic please don’t hesitate to contact us.