Tenthpin
Augmenting Life Sciences Industry with the Power of SAP

Founded in 2017, Tenthpin has been focusing exclusively on the life science and healthcare sectors. As the saying goes, ‘great partnerships begin with trust’; since inception, the company has earned the trust of several pharmaceutical as well as some of the animal health, biotech, medical device and clinical research companies. Tenthpin’s global network of life sciences industry experts strive to deliver innovative and effective solutions to meet the unique and most complex demands of their clients.

Following are the insights shared by Jürgen Bauer, the co-founding partner and chairman of Tenthpin as to how they provide independent advice and services to their clients through their deep expertise in the life sciences industry.

In your interactions with the CIOs of life sciences companies, what sense do you get of the challenges they face?

In the past decades, many of our clients have invested extensively in their ERP overhead and have generated significant values out of these investments. At present, the challenges are coming from three dimensions. The first being how can one increase and sustain the value out of the ERP investments that they have made and also keep their architecture flexible and agile to respond to reorganizations, M&A activities, and divestments.

The second challenge relates to SAP coming up with new products to the market starting with HANA, S4HANA, Leonardo, and Fiori. Many of our clients are in a dilemma about the next step that they should undertake to drive the value, and also the areas in which they should invest. At the same time, they can not overlook the innovations that SAP brings to the table. The third and last dimension is around new technologies. The role of IT is changing for our clients because as the technology becomes part of products, it becomes part of the services as well. Many companies on IT side have evolved with new solutions and products, but the question remains as to what best of breed applications they should adopt on top of their ERP black boxes. As we consider digitalization, IoT, AI, and other trending areas to increase the value of technology and draw the businesses towards us, we will ensure to leverage our know-hows, and look toward new SAP products that can be adopted, as well as the other non-SAP products that can be leveraged by our clients disrupting traditional ways of doing business.

Please walk us through your SAP services on the basis of your methodology, features, and benefits involved.

Being one of the most experienced consulting firms, Tenthpin assists its clients to drive the transformational change. Our customer onboarding begins with understanding where the biggest needs are and where the biggest impact can be made. Currently, we are witnessing many of our customers do not want to spend massive amounts on large ERP programs because it takes years until they get the value out of those implementations. To this end, it is all about gaining a thorough knowledge of what the key priorities are and how we can reduce the time frame and maximize the value that we are delivering. We achieve this by focusing on prioritization and channeling the investments to the area that brings incremental value to our clients and not by selling maximum consultants to the clients.

To ensure the timely and qualitative delivery of solutions to clients, our consultants engage with them to understand their challenges, current ERP architectures, and the reason for or behind their ERP implementations. Our consultants do not just have thorough clarity about the process, but also they understand the specific needs of the life science industry and its segments on the commercial, operational, and R&D area. Bearing this ERP and industry knowledge, we assist our clients from not being pushed towards buying the new products in the market. This happens with the large companies who have their own product range, and clearly, they push their clients to go for the products from their portfolio. Tenthpin being an independent organization provide the freedom to clients in choosing the finest solutions from what is available in the market. It comes down to the industry and technology expertise, and the ability to independently tailor solutions in the light of what has already been done in the past.

Could you shed some light on your partnership with SAP?

We are coordinating with SAP to assist them in extending the product portfolio and identify and address the industry-specific requirements in the life science sector. We are working in the direction to figure out where their solutions can be extended or what kind of consulting services are required to get full value out of an ERP system. For instance, for one of our clients, we are developing an e-labelling solution on top of their existing ERP—which is currently an SAP system—to move to the electronic labels from the printed label while being compliant to the regulatory requirements. In other words, we are helping them to move from a legacy solution to a digitized solution to obtain the expected ROI out of their ERP system.

What does the future hold for Tenthpin?

On the sales side, we will continue to grow in the markets that we have already established mainly in Europe and North America. Moving forward, we are planning to expand our footprint in the APAC region as well.

From an organizational perspective, we would focus on the growth while being positioned as a boutique company to cater to the unique needs of the clients. We are also planning on partnering with a network of organizations to bring in best-of-breed solutions to our clients rather than selling organization-owned specific solutions.