As the IT head of India’s largest pharmaceutical company, a company ranked among the top ten pharmaceutical companies globally, David Briskman’s objectives are clear—helping R&D deliver products quickly to the market, enabling supply chain excellence, and delivering business intelligence to empower management to take the right decisions.
In Ranbaxy’s case, supply chain excellence is critical as the company has a global footprint in more than 40 countries, with manufacturing facilities in more than 10 countries. More significantly, the company serves a customer base spread across 125 countries. This throws up unique challenges on both the supply side and the demand side, as the IT function has to adapt quickly to enable or deliver scalable, flexible, and standardized processes that will enable Ranbaxy to quickly serve new markets. On the regulatory side, it is mandatory for pharmaceutical companies to adhere to country and industry compliance requirements. With such unique challenges, the role of IT is crucial in transforming business, improving compliance and delivering performance at far lower costs compared to other established majors.
Our global CIO has helped Ranbaxy do just that, through a series of IT initiatives that have helped Ranbaxy significantly improve its competitiveness. IT initiatives such as continued automation in the R&D function, setting up the electronic submission backbone and creating a global regulatory database have set a benchmark for other pharmaceutical companies to follow. Given his achievements, it is no surprise that Briskman is a part of the Executive Committee, an apex body at Ranbaxy that oversees the company's global functioning.
Setting the benchmark
With more than 20 years of business experience and having dabbled in multiple roles— from sales to consulting to implementation—Briskman’s intricate knowledge of the industry has helped Ranbaxy succeed in a market that is marked by constant changes. The critical role of IT can be seen from the fact that today, Ranbaxy has a single global instance of SAP that runs over 80 percent of its business transactions by value.
This is one of the most complex SAP implementations in terms of different business processes in different countries, and also considering the scale of the implementation. For instance, close to 2,200 users across 22 countries and 14 manufacturing facilities use SAP for their daily activities. Today, the organization’s backbone runs on SAP.
“Experience is the best teacher,” says Briskman who believes that one can be an effective leader by learning from experience. Briskman recalls an ERP project at Kraft Foods, which he terms as the toughest project of his career, involving the implementation of ERP across 11 manufacturing plants in a time span of just 18 months. It involved replacing business processes in a non receptive technology environment. This project was a success and taught Briskman a lot about the nuances of team and project management.
Briskman believes it is important to continuously measure value. His team constantly measures the value delivered by all IT projects. However, he states that every project cannot be measured on an ROI basis—since projects such as a business dashboard are more strategic in nature.
Advice for emerging CIOs
“A proactive CIO needs to be a Chief Innovation Officer, and must do what is necessary for business—not necessarily IT. In short, do not be an IT guy, be a business guy,” says Briskman, on the need for CIOs to step out of their IT shoes, and think of ways that can improve the bottom line. Briskman makes it mandatory for his team to read the company’s Annual Report and understand P&L statements so that they can better understand the needs of the business, and think like sales, production, or finance personnel. He even encourages his team to spend a day at the shop floor and attend meetings with sales people so that the mindset of the IT team is aligned with the business.
With respect to goals, Briskman advises CIOs to keep it simple and pragmatic. “You need to have a strategic direction in place, and you must be clear on what you want to achieve. That said, you must also be extremely pragmatic and look at how you can achieve your goals with the resources you have,” says Briskman.