How a global manufacturer of injectable medicine components modernized its SAP landscape

Summary

A leading global manufacturer of containment and delivery systems for injectable medicines ran a highly customized legacy SAP ECC landscape across 50 locations and 25 manufacturing facilities worldwide, with more than $1.8 billion in annual revenue and over 100 million components produced every day. To keep pace with its multi-site, multi-geography footprint, the organization needed to move to SAP S/4HANA without disrupting regulated manufacturing operations. Marlabs deployed a dedicated migration team that standardized processes across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, executed a brownfield conversion, and guided the client to a stable, business-as-usual environment within five weeks of go-live.

Challenge

The client's legacy SAP ECC environment had grown heavily customized over years of operation across dozens of sites and multiple regions. Master data was fragmented across plants, products, and suppliers, making it difficult to standardize core processes or move quickly as a single, coordinated organization. At the same time, the client operated in a tightly regulated industry, so any migration had to sustain regulatory and validation readiness throughout the transition rather than treating compliance as a final step. The organization needed a path to SAP S/4HANA that modernized its core systems while protecting a manufacturing footprint that produced more than 100 million components a day.

Solution

Marlabs deployed a dedicated SAP S/4HANA migration team and moved the client through a phased brownfield conversion designed to minimize business disruption.

Assessing readiness and mapping the conversion roadmap

The team began with a system readiness assessment and a simplification item analysis to understand exactly how the client's customizations would behave on SAP S/4HANA. It scoped the custom code that needed remediation before conversion and used those findings to define a brownfield conversion roadmap and a wave plan. This phase gave the client a clear, sequenced view of the migration before any system was touched, reducing the risk of surprises later in the project.

Converting core processes through a brownfield approach

With the roadmap in place, the team converted the client's finance, supply chain, manufacturing, and sales processes onto SAP S/4HANA. The conversion included a move to New GL and the Universal Journal, along with a Business Partner conversion that unified how the client managed customer and vendor records. Marlabs also helped the client standardize record-to-report, procure-to-pay, master data management, order-to-cash, and supply chain processes across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, replacing inconsistent regional practices with a common approach.

Validating the conversion through mock migration cycles

Before committing to a live cutover, the team ran multiple mock migration cycles using production-like data volumes. These rehearsals let Marlabs de-risk the eventual cutover and tune the downtime windows the client's manufacturing operations could tolerate. Running the conversion repeatedly against realistic data surfaced issues early, when they were far cheaper and safer to fix than they would have been during the actual go-live.

Migrating and reconciling master and transactional data

Marlabs cleansed, mapped, and loaded the client's master and transactional data using the SAP Migration Cockpit. Every data set moved through full reconciliation and sign-off before it was trusted in the new environment, giving the client confidence that its financial and operational records carried over accurately. This discipline mattered especially given how fragmented the client's master data had been across plants, products, and suppliers before the project began.

Managing cutover and stabilizing the business

In the final phase, the team managed the live go-live cutover, rolled out SAP Fiori to give users a modern interface on the new system, and ran a structured hypercare period alongside the client's business teams. Marlabs paired technical stabilization with hands-on user enablement so that employees across the client's global footprint could adopt the new processes quickly. That combination of technical rigor and close collaboration with the business is what let the client return to a stable, business-as-usual environment within five weeks of go-live.

Results

The migration gave the client standardized, consistent processes across every country in its EMEA footprint, replacing a patchwork of regional practices with a single way of working. The client reduced its SAP transaction codes by around 70%, a direct result of the simplification work done during the readiness assessment and brownfield conversion. Its overall SAP landscape became simpler as well, with less custom code to maintain and lower ongoing run costs. Operating procedure documentation dropped by 80%, reflecting how much complexity the client was able to remove from its day-to-day processes. Most notably, the client reached a stable, business-as-usual environment within just five weeks of go-live, a fast stabilization timeline for a brownfield conversion of this scale.

Impact

The migration delivered measurable gains across the client's global operations.

• Standardized consistent processes across every country in the EMEA scope.

• Reduced SAP transaction codes by around 70%.

• Simplified the SAP landscape, cutting custom code and lowering run costs.

• Cut operating procedure documentation by 80%.

• Reached a stable, business-as-usual environment within five weeks of go-live.