Clarkston’s S/4HANA Life Sciences Accelerator: What Is It?
Clarkston’s S/4HANA Life Sciences Accelerator is a pre-packaged deployment solution of SAP S/4HANA® for pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical device companies. This model is built leveraging nearly 30 years of SAP experience in the life sciences industry. A standard SAP implementation is typically executed in 5 stages: Prepare – Explore – Realize – Deploy – Run. Given the time-consuming and resource-intensive nature of an SAP implementation, savings in any of those these stages can be quite substantial. Our LS Accelerator addresses this resulting in an estimated average time savings between 30-40%, from Project Preparation to Go-Live.
Our years of industry expertise in the industries of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, combined with a 100% SAP implementation success rate has equipped us with experienced resources and time-tested methodologies.
Now, what is Clarkston’s S/4HANA Life Sciences Accelerator?
It is a modular, pre-packaged deployment of a complete and functional SAP S/4HANA solution that combines SAP’s Best Practices with Clarkston’s industry experience. It is based on leading industry business processes and built on an S/4HANA on-prem solution with a single tenant configuration targeted towards greenfield or new implementations. Most importantly, the Life Science Accelerator  is also a validation-ready solution, with specific user and functional requirements designed to be compliant with regulatory demands of the life sciences industry.
Our tailored approach adapts to the level of maturity and the ERP involvement that our clients want to have at that particular moment in time – ‘What you need, when you need it’. Essentially, what we want to offer our clients is a catalogue of components to let them pick and choose exactly which components make sense for them. For example, if you are in the pre-commercial phase, you may be interested in procurement and finance processes and not the full-blown solution. If, at a later stage, you want to expand your scope and increase your SAP functionality, we will be able to activate additional components that align with business requirements and existing system capabilities.
What are the actual Building Blocks that constitute Clarkston’s Life Sciences Accelerator?
1.      Technical Components: Activated Configuration Sets to set up Organizational and Master Data Structures and support end-to-end processes, Technical WRICEF’s, Data Conversion Templates,
2.      Functional Components: All supporting deliverables, documents and artifacts that support the technical elements and that support the business through a successful transformation. Includes User Requirements Specifications (URS), Functional Requirements Specifications (FRS), Risk Assessment, Business Process Design Documents, Test Scenario Catalogues, Test Scripts, Security Roles and User Groups and Training Materials and lastly a Traceability Matrix (expanded upon below)
Traceability Matrix: Validation is a critical component of a Life Science SAP implementation. Which is why we focus on all our technical and functional components being ‘validation-ready’. I.E, ready to be put in context and evaluated by a computer systems validation team. For that, we are anchoring all functional components in a Risk Assessment and Traceability Matrix.
This matrix is a collection of user requirements correlated to functional requirements. It addresses the following questions:
- What does the business require the system to do?
- Through what mechanism will the system perform that action (what t-code, what fiori application or what custom object will be used)?
- Does the designed solution ensure complete business coverage?
By having the functionality matrix up front, we are effectively cutting down blueprinting what the scope of the project will be. Helps determine which functional aspects are truly needed by the business as well as the identification of additional downstream deliverables.
3.      Other Supporting Tools: We have a wide portfolio of tools and accelerators to support additional aspects of the project that are not necessarily related to functional requirements. These are closely aligned with Project Management, Change Management and Effort Estimation.
View more of Clarkston’s SAP services and offerings here.
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Contributions by Eshan Kalarikkal and Paulo Sanchez.
