The Institute Jantung Negara (IJN), Malaysia’s national heart institute, has implemented SAP ERP 6 on SAP HANA and SAP Ariba to help it comply with new GST legislation, introduced in Malaysia in 2014, as well as improve workflow efficiency and business processes, and monitor inventory levels in real time.
IJN employees previously used multiple systems to manage its inventory, finances and supply chain. Both time and resource-intensive, these processes also affected the accuracy of inventory management and forecasting.
“One of the biggest issues we faced internally was optimising our inventory. While we strive to allocate our supplies efficiently to ensure we don’t run out or have an excessive surplus, this can be challenging,” said IJN CEO Dato’ Dr Mohd Ashari Yakub.
IJN was seeking a total healthcare solution that was easy to use, integrated, and had the capacity to provide accurate analysis and real-time insights. Importantly, SAP solutions were already GST certified by the Royal Malaysia Customs Department.
The implementation of SAP ERP on HANA has significantly simplified and improved visibility of IJN’s business processes, by combining both transactions and analytics on a single platform. This has improve agility, responsiveness and decision-making for financial planning, inventory management and procurement, according to the institute.
IJN also implemented SAP Ariba Sourcing, Supplier Information and Performance Management, as well as Contract Management solutions. These solutions are expected to help the institute to automate and streamline critical tasks across the sourcing lifecycle, as well as identify savings opportunities and negotiate more favourable purchasing arrangements. The solutions, providing standardised processes, will also improve efficiency and lower administrative costs.
The SAP ERP implementation was completed within seven months, in time for the GST registration deadline, by SAP partner T-Systems.
“Working together with IJN, we were able to quickly map our processes that needed to be fine-tuned and develop a change management plan before conducting the implementation, so that the upgrade was seamless,” said Natasha Kwan, managing director, T-Systems Asia South.
