Advertisment

IT smoothens GSK merger

author-image
CIOL Bureau
Updated On
New Update

GOA: It was hardly two years back that pharma majors Glaxo and Smeethkline Beecham merged to form Glaxo Smeethkline Beecham (GSK). Though initially, the new entity faced a lot of hiccups to synergize the two disparate business models, IT played the pivotal role in achieving a dynamic and authentic consummation of the two. It however did not come cheap–GSK has had to make an year-on-year investment in the upside of Rs5 crore for the last three years on IT alone. With results now starting to show in, the 2004 budget might go below the Rs5 crore mark.

Advertisment

"While Glaxo had a total decentralized model of functioning, everything in Smeetkline Beecham was centralized. Even the IT systems in the two were disparate, and therefore in the last two years the primary driver behind automation was to achieve an organizational integration." This was revealed by S Suresh, the CIO with GSK during the C-Change forum in Goa. According to him, the integration process is still going on, as GSK even today has two ERPs, the JD Edwards from Glaxo and the BPCS legact from Smeethkline Beecham.

However, according to him, 2004 would see the phase of consolidation, when apart from integration, other IT projects would include setting up an intranet, a HRMS solution and most importantly a Sales Force Automation tool to connect 2000 medical representatives and 500 mangers who are perennially on the field. These projects would further reduce complexity in the integration process and achieve further optimization of the normal business processes.

What could be the best result to see whether the integration has worked. Suresh’s retort: "check the cost incurred individually by the two entities and their production efficiency and then see whether the production efficiency of ther new entity is greater than the sun total of the two, even if the costs do not come down." GSK wins on all counts, production efficiency has increased by 10 to 40 per cent, while even cost reduction has been in double digits.

CyberMedia News Service

tech-news