Managing Growth: A New Wrinkle for Pharmaceutical Companies

Specialty pharmaceutical companies have become some of the fastest growing businesses in the industry. But many must resort to extreme makeovers to adjust business operations to rapid market changes. For Medicis Pharmaceutical Corporation, a leading U.S. specialty pharmaceutical company, the path to managing growth started with an integrated SAP solution and our hosting of this business-critical application.

Medicis offers a wide range of branded prescription medications and doctor-dispensed products in a number of skin care categories. In the past five years, continual development of new products, successful acquisitions and strategic collaborations have led to a compounded annual growth rate of approximately 15 percent.

During this growth, the company's business processes lagged, residing on multiple home-grown and legacy systems that were unable to communicate with each other. Without a centralized IT strategy or system, retrieving and analyzing business information for its employees proved to be labor-intensive and time-consuming with orders requiring manual processing.

Integration Through SAP: Poised for Future Growth

Medicis implemented an SAP solution to standardize and integrate core business processes across its enterprise. The new SAP system enables Medicis' multi-entity corporate structure to be fully integrated, thus eliminating the risk of human error and reducing the labor cost and time required to process financials. The company also implemented Model-N, a revenue-management software program designed especially for the pharmaceutical industry.

Integration, Standardization, Continious Support and More

With CSC hosting managing the solution, Medicis has also achieved:

• Flexibility. Adjustable application support allows Medicis to quickly dial-up or dial-down hosting services as needed to shift focus to core company competencies.
• Stability & Performance. Hosted applications run at the highest level of availability and performance since we began supporting the SAP infrastructure.
• Security. Our experience, best practices and processes ensure compliance with FDA requirements.