Thermo Fisher speeds product launches with Oracle Cloud
To serve the biotech industry, Thermo Fisher Scientific depends on constant new product invention, and Oracle helps it accelerate that capability.
“Moving to Oracle Cloud Product Lifecycle Management has provided our business with the opportunity to rethink our processes and our data model, as well as to introduce opportunities to automate repetitive tasks.”
Business challenges
From instruments for genetic engineering to enzymes used in DNA sequencing, Thermo Fisher Scientific provides the tools that help scientists make the world better. But to help people doing cutting-edge research, the $30 billion-a-year company needs to constantly create new products to meet scientists’ changing needs.
Because its success is so heavily predicated upon new product innovation, Thermo Fisher Scientific launches tens of thousands of new products annually. To support this growth and innovation, the team began looking for a cloud-based product lifecycle management (PLM) software system that could support all the new products being designed and manufactured at any given time.
The company has grown tremendously in the last 14 years, including acquiring 20 companies and now employing more than 80,000 people. With 24 divisions within the company, the leadership team wanted a PLM system that could bring these business units under one application and help them all get new products to market faster.
Why Thermo Fisher Scientific Chose Oracle
After evaluating many options, Thermo Fisher Scientific was convinced that Oracle Cloud Product Lifecycle Management, combined with process changes, could bring a major increase in how quickly the company could launch new products. Oracle Cloud PLM’s automatic quarterly updates were one of the things that most excited the company, because the updates would provide a steady flow of new capabilities and the software would remain current. Scalability was another big determining factor in the company’s decision to migrate from its an on-premises PLM system to a cloud solution, because Oracle Cloud PLM could manage employees’ work throughout many business units globally.
Results
Moving to Oracle Cloud PLM has helped Thermo Fisher Scientific dramatically increase the number of product launches that it’s capable of each year. “With Oracle Cloud PLM, our goal was to design the capability to launch up to 50,000 SKUs at a time within a few weeks. This used to take us up to nine months with our on-premises system,” says John Moran, Thermo Fisher Scientific data management director.
With more than 5,800 employees around the world using or impacted by the new cloud application, Oracle Cloud PLM also has met the company’s need for a highly scalable system. For a company dependent on new product introductions, having both scale and speed is vital to its ability to serve the ever-changing biotechnology industry.
Partners
Thermo Fisher chose Birlasoft for help with implementation of the product master data management (MDM) capabilities within Oracle Cloud PLM. Birlasoft helped develop a roadmap and build a strategy to streamline the product commercialization process.