Pharmaceutical companies operate at the intersection of some of the world’s most complex supply chains, strictest compliance regimes, and highest stakes for innovation. Every decision, from clinical trial design to commercial distribution, relies on timely, accurate, and integrated data.
Nonetheless, one of the biggest obstacles in the pharmaceutical industry lies within its own walls: the unification of ERP data with other critical data sources, without which true enterprise analytics is forever out of reach.
Modernizing analytics in pharma isn’t just about moving faster, either. Pharmaceutical executives are under tremendous pressure to ensure data integrity across highly regulated environments, enable collaboration on a global scale, and uncover clinically significant insights that can save lives, reduce costs, or both.
The Challenges of Pharma ERP Data
The complexity of pharmaceutical operations produces unique hurdles when it comes to optimizing ERP workloads.
- Data Silos & Fragmentation: Manufacturing, R&D, regulatory, and commercial functions often sit in separate SAP instances or modules, making it difficult to build a single, consistent view of operations.
- Complex Data Structures: ERP data is stored in ways optimized for transactions—not analytics. Extracting meaningful insights often requires deep technical expertise and manual wrangling.
- Regulatory Burden: Data access and reporting processes must adhere to strict compliance requirements (e.g., FDA 21 CFR Part 11, EMA guidelines, GxP standards), leaving little room for error.
- High Costs: Traditional SAP reporting and on-premises data warehouses drive up MIPS consumption and infrastructure costs while limiting agility.
Taken together, these barriers mean that business teams struggle to get timely insights, while IT teams are bogged down in managing pipelines rather than enabling innovation.
SAP Analytics, Reimagined with Snowflake
Fortunately for pharma data leaders, the story doesn’t have to go that way. By migrating SAP analytics workloads to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, pharma companies can slash costs, simplify their data architectures, and empower more powerful analytics capabilities in one fell swoop.
With Hakkoda’s proven-but-flexible approach to SAP-to-Snowflake data pipelines, pharmaceutical companies gain:
- Seamless Data Extraction: Purpose-built connectors and pipelines move data out of rigid SAP structures and into Snowflake in near real-time, without disrupting critical ERP operations.
- Unified Data Foundation: ERP data joins seamlessly with clinical trial, lab, IoT, and commercial datasets, giving pharma teams a true 360° view of operations and patient outcomes.
- Regulatory-Grade Governance: Snowflake’s fine-grained security, lineage tracking, and auditability ensure analytics meet strict compliance requirements.
- Cost Efficiency: Offloading analytics workloads from SAP dramatically reduces system strain and MIPS consumption while shifting to Snowflake’s flexible, pay-as-you-go model.
- Advanced Analytics & AI: Once unlocked, ERP data can be layered with AI/ML, predictive analytics, and real-time dashboards—driving smarter forecasting, risk monitoring, and demand planning.
Hakkōda’s Approach to SAP Analytics
At Hakkoda, we understand both the complexity of SAP data structures and the unique regulatory demands each of our industries contends with.
Our data engineers and consultants bring the expertise you need to build modern pipelines and design analytics ecosystems together with the deep industry experience needed to tailor those solutions for pharma’s realities.
Our solutions:
- Leverage Snowflake’s modern data stack to unify fragmented ERP and non-ERP sources.
- Apply domain-specific expertise in compliance, quality, and supply chain analytics.
- Deliver scalable architectures that meet today’s reporting needs while enabling tomorrow’s AI-driven insights.
Now backed with IBM’s roster of over 18,000 certified SAP consultants and decades of success delivering high-ROI analytics solutions, Hakkoda is more prepared than ever before to transform your ERP data into a true strategic enabler of speed, compliance, and cost efficiency.
Unlocking the Next Era of Pharmaceutical Insights
In a colossal industry where speed to insight can mean speed to market or to life-saving medical interventions, data leaders can no longer afford to keep their ERP records locked away in silos.
By pairing SAP expertise with the flexible, centralized analytics capabilities of the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, Hakkoda empowers pharmaceutical organizations to unlock value, cut costs, and modernize analytics capabilities in ways they never imagined, all without compromising compliance.
Ready to modernize your pharma analytics strategy? Talk to one of our SAP experts today to get started.
