SAP S/4HANA To Support Supply Chain Modernization at CBS

Published: 26/October/2021

Reading time: 6 mins

A combination of changing customer and employee expectations, and an increased need for digital engagement and business agility in the healthcare industry have acted as a catalyst for an SAP S/4HANA business case at Canadian Blood Services (CBS). Shifting its interactions with hospitals and donors to an online experience and improving overall user experience for all of its stakeholders — including its employees — is informing digital transformation across the organization.

SAPinsider talked with CBS’s CIO Ralph Michaelis, who heads up the organization’s enterprise IT group, to learn what is inspiring CBS’s latest innovations. One specific key performance indicator (KPI) noted by Michaelis is to become more agile and dynamic in collections planning and inventory management for plasma-protein-driven products. “We collect about 800,000 units of blood and we do that through about 1.2 million appointments every year. It’s a large volume,” Michaelis says.

CBS was able to increase the frequency of its collections planning to be done on a quarterly basis, rather than annually. Michaelis says the next goal is to conduct planning every few weeks. And, Digital donor engagement has improved from 5% to 80%, says Michaelis. He refers to the results as “not a boom but a game of inches,” explaining that continuous innovation in bursts happened over a five-year span. “If your horizon for delivery is too long, you risk the context of that project changing within that timeframe.”

Read this Executive Insight and learn:
– How CBS is “crossing technology boundaries” to deliver exceptional user experience;
– The skills that CBS is investing in to fundamentally re-engineer business processes and achieve outcomes in weeks as opposed to months; and
– Advice from Michaelis about where to “color outside of the lines” and how to innovate in short bursts when planning an SAP S/4HANA deployment.