Data Quality That Accelerates Global Pharma Transformation

Project Background

Since 2016, Syniti has been a trusted data transformation partner for one of the world’s most recognized pharmaceutical companies. From early migration initiatives to complex data quality reporting, Syniti has helped support the company’s broader digital transformation agenda— culminating in its global rollout of SAP S/4HANA scheduled through 2030. At the core of this work is data quality, a strategic capability that has grown to represent a multi-million dollar annual investment and serves as the foundation for business agility, supply chain resilience, and AI-readiness.

Challenges

The global biopharmaceutical company faced significant challenges typical of large-scale, multinational enterprises:

• Disconnected ERP environments (7 global ECC systems)
• Limited visibility into data issues and readiness
• Inconsistent material and business partner master data
• Regulatory and quality risk from poor data traceability

With over 35 global deployments planned as part of its SAP S/4HANA transformation, data quality wasn’t just a technical requirement—it was mission-critical to ensure clean transitions, optimized operations, and business continuity.

SYNITI’S APPROACH

Data Quality Reporting: Turning Visibility into Action

Syniti engaged across multiple workstreams to embed data quality into the company’s enterprise data lifecycle.

1. Global Data Profiling & Readiness Reporting
By connecting directly to all ECC systems, Syniti enabled visibility into data quality, eliminating the need for manual data pulls and spreadsheets. Detailed reports powered the company’s cleanse tools, enabling mass updates to legacy data ahead of migration and reducing the risk of data loss Applying custom data quality rules freed site-level teams to prioritize high-impact data fixes.

2. Legacy Data Cleansing
Syniti built a robust library of custom data quality reports—many in collaboration with the client’s consulting partner—to address long-standing issues like aging purchase orders, duplicate business partners, and inconsistent material records. The insights allowed the business to cleanse millions of records ahead of S/4HANA migrations.

4. Power BI Dashboards for Executive Readiness
Syniti embedded reporting into executive dashboards using Power BI to visualize data readiness at each site and across each deployment wave. These scorecards provided stakeholders with visibility into data cleansing ahead of deployments, allowing them to make informed decisions about when and where migrations were viable based on actual data conditions.

3. Material Master Enrichment & Risk Reduction
In a previous engagement, Syniti helped mitigate a billion-dollar liability when a supplier’s relocation caused defects in packaging materials. By classifying and tagging critical materials and direct materials—components that go directly into final pharmaceutical products—the client could improve traceability, reduce supplier risk, and enhance regulatory compliance.

5. Business Partner Harmonization
Leveraging Syniti’s harmonization capabilities, the team identified and resolved duplicates across vendors, customers, and business partners—improving downstream reporting, procurement efficiency, and operational accuracy.

Key Results

Direct Materials & Supply Chain: Enhanced Traceability and Risk Reduction

In the pharmaceutical industry, direct materials—raw ingredients, excipients, packaging components, and any other material that goes into a final product—are highly regulated and critical to patient safety. Poor quality, supplier inconsistency, or a lack of traceability can lead to regulatory violations, costly recalls, and loss of brand trust.

In one instance, changes in packaging material resulted in defects and product quality issues in many of the packages used for the pharmaceutical’s top branded medicines. Without visibility into the supply chain to locate the proper supplier, this liability could have potentially resulted in billions of dollars in lost sales revenue.

To address these challenges, Syniti embedded data quality into the heart of their supply chain processes, with a specific focus on how direct materials were classified, tracked, and managed across global sites. Syniti led the enrichment and classification of materials with attributes, classes and characters to identify materials as either critical or direct across systems. Automated rules and logic were implemented to flag materials missing the proper attributes, while data cleansing and standardization was performed across global ERP instances.

By improving the integrity and consistency of material data, Syniti enabled the consolidation and streamlining of the supply chain and the data feeding into the downstream reporting system. The company can now accurately report on direct materials and trace them down to a single supplier source, helping to de-risk the supply chain and enable proactive mitigation planning for materials lacking redundancy or alternate sourcing.

Using Data Quality to Enable Ongoing Transformation

What began as a migration-driven initiative evolved into a core enabler of supply chain reliability and operational excellence. The program has matured into a highly structured operation with dedicated teams for technical processes, report building, and dashboard delivery. To date, it has identified more than 44 million defects and processed over 24 terabytes of data, supported by more than 20 custom web apps to manage refresh cycles, audit functions, and user access—ensuring efficiency and consistency at scale.

The company aims to nearly double revenue by the end of the decade. To achieve this, the enterprise is deepening its investment in innovation platforms, automation, and AI—and Syniti is playing a pivotal role. Syniti helped this pharmaceutical giant future-proof its operations and create a resilient, high-quality data foundation for future AI, automation, and risk-reduction strategies.

Future initiatives using Syniti will include:

• Monitoring and improving S/4HANA data post-deployment
• Continued integration with SAP’s Business Technology Platform and SAP Toolchain

By embedding proactive data governance into each phase of their S/4HANA journey, the client is ensured scalable growth, reduced operational risk, and a strong data foundation for automation and AI.