Takeda: Standardizing global supply chain processes to enhance overall efficiency ahead of sustainable business transformation
Real impact from business process transformation
As a company that discovers and delivers life-changing treatments, Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited always puts patients first. When embarking on its large-scale transformation into SAP Cloud ERP capabilities, it chose to take the RISE with SAP journey and use the SAP Signavio portfolio. This approach allowed it to focus on standardizing specific supply chain processes, helping it deliver treatments more efficiently to those in need.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Life sciences | Tokyo, Japan | ~50,000 employees |
weeks to ascertain global process improvement opportunities.
visibility into process adherence and deviations.
measurable reduction in annual supply chain working hours.
Global Business Transformation Lead—Supply Chain, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Reengineering business processes to deliver treatments faster
Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited is a global patient-focused, values-based biopharmaceutical company that has been driven by innovative research and development for over 240 years to improve people’s health. Dedicated to discovering and delivering life-transforming treatments, Takeda is guided by its commitment to patients, its people, and the planet while staying grounded in the values of integrity, fairness, honesty, and perseverance.
Through its research and development activities, it aims to discover and develop life-transforming medicines for patients with both rare and more prevalent diseases, and it manufactures medicines and vaccines at 22 sites worldwide.
As the organization expanded through acquisitions, it built a diverse system landscape with multiple integrations and unique processes across business units, particularly in supply chain and finance. This diversity presented an opportunity to enhance global standardization, streamline operations, and improve visibility into process performance across the enterprise.
To continue delivering treatments efficiently to patients, Takeda focused on further improving its processes and enabling faster, data-driven decision-making in its supply chain. Before preparing and embarking on the move to SAP Cloud ERP, the company’s European subsidiary, Takeda Pharmaceuticals International AG, turned its attention to the impact and potential of business process transformation as a critical first step. This is where SAP Signavio plays a key role in the ERP transformation toolchain.
Global Business Transformation Lead—Supply Chain, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Creating an ideal setup for a cloud ERP transformation
Aiming to be live on SAP Cloud ERP within three years, complete with integrated AI and uniform processes globally, Takeda understood standardization and a clean core approach were key to unlocking value from a future-ready architecture. To execute its strategy to standardize and harmonize existing processes, Takeda adopted SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite on top of its existing instances of the SAP ERP application to identify process variances.
Roland Straub, global business transformation lead for supply chain at Takeda, explains, “We took SAP Signavio into the mix of our applications because we wanted to understand the prevalence of process variances. And we wanted to prove that we could get this done in specific business areas and at speed.”
In terms of process mining, Takeda used insights generated from the accelerated process discovery service with SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite to help it quickly identify and prioritize focus areas. And to support the creation of a global process ownership model across functions, Takeda adopted the SAP Signavio Process Governance solution.
Global Business Transformation Lead—Supply Chain, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Making processes fit for changing business models and future challenges
Takeda used process intelligence and process mining functionality from SAP Signavio to analyze existing processes, helping it identify variances and record different process developments across the company. Straub says that the company can refer to this information and compare it to the industry standard and how it was defined in the past.
Within the focus areas identified through the accelerated process discovery service, Takeda undertook a process analysis deep dive on logistics execution. In doing so, it took just 12 weeks to identify key inefficiencies benchmarked against the industry standard.
Since adopting SAP Signavio solutions, Takeda has gained real-time visibility into process adherence and deviations, allowing it to quickly address anomalies. Straub comments, “We can see that people are following our processes, and deviations are easy to spot. This helps us understand where more training is required to help our people properly execute a process or smooth operations when there’s a change in the business or new people are onboarded.”
The company is also using the portfolio in a more future-oriented way. In readiness for the move to SAP Cloud ERP, it’s planning to further expand its business process management and design process under the domain of the SAP Signavio portfolio. In doing so, it can get help from SAP Signavio in documenting evolutions and adapting processes accordingly as the business evolves.
Takeda is also building a global process ownership model over various functions, including supply chain, commercial, finance, and manufacturing, using SAP Signavio to steer the right way to set up how processes will be executed in the future.
Global Business Transformation Lead—Supply Chain, Takeda Pharmaceuticals
Exploring embedded AI capabilities for an enhanced user experience
Takeda’s move to SAP Cloud ERP through RISE with SAP is a major focus for the organization in its ongoing digital transformation journey, including actively exploring AI with SAP S/4HANA and enabling embedded AI capabilities. Straub comments, “One of our priorities is enabling AI capabilities as a standard part of our new architecture, including developments from SAP Business AI.”
Straub also says that the company is excited about using the SAP Fiori user experience and Joule technology to transform the end-user interface.