When a three-year SAP S/4HANA migration involves over 500 people across 13 countries, who really expects everything to go exactly as planned?
But for pharmaceutical company Orion Pharma, the ideal became reality: the system went live as planned, and their carefully built SAP S/4HANA environment was up and running from day one.
Yet for Orion, this wasn’t just a technical upgrade. It was an organisation-wide transformation:
- Processes were standardised and documented to meet GxP requirements
- SAP Solution Manager was adopted to support ALM processes
- Data-driven decision-making became part of daily work
The success was built on thorough groundwork, with Qalmari involved from the very beginning. Clear processes, the right tools, and Qalmari’s hands-on experience with similar projects helped keep everything on track and ensured that any issues were resolved fast.
As a result, Orion’s processes are now better documented and more unified than ever. The entire organisation follows the same ways of working, and every change to the system, from idea to implementation and testing, is fully traceable and GxP-compliant.
Matching solutions with business needs
Such a massive transformation demanded solid change management, thorough documentation and careful coordination of testing.
Qalmari’s experts worked side-by-side with Orion to define ways of working, roles and responsibilities, weigh different options, and ensure the solutions aligned with Orion’s business needs.
“We had no prior experience with SAP Solution Manager or what kind of value it could bring,” explains Tiia Vainionpää, Program Engineer at Orion. “Qalmari saw the whole picture from our perspective, broke it down clearly, and explained it in a way that made us feel like we were speaking the same language.”
In the early stages, Qalmari helped clarify the full potential of SAP Solution Manager, and the ALM processes to be adopted were chosen based on Orion’s needs.
After the decisions were made, Qalmari’s role was to configure, test, train, and support the team to ensure the processes worked in practice.
GxP compliance from the ground up
Change Request Management (ChaRM) was especially critical, as every system change had to be documented and validated in line with GxP regulations.
“ChaRM simply wouldn’t have worked without Qalmari’s support,” Vainionpää admits.
Some SAP Solution Manager functionalities also required serious customisation to meet the demands of a GxP environment. Qalmari kept everything under control, making sure every requirement was met.
“At no point did it feel like Qalmari was just delivering what was ordered. It was obvious we were in it together, working as one team,” says Vainionpää.
Data over guesswork
One of the key achievements was bringing data-driven management into daily practice. The project team used SAP Solution Manager dashboards to monitor testing progress, documentation readiness, change requests, and defects in real time. This helped them focus support exactly where it was needed most.
Due to GxP demands, the project produced over 1,100 technical documents. Their status was continuously monitored through Solution Documentation, following best practices.
“If we’d tried to track all that in Excel, the outcome would’ve been very different,” Vainionpää notes with a smile. “We always had a clear view of what was ready for Go-live, and that level of transparency made Go-live a success.”
Qalmari expert Patrik Koso played a key role in supporting Orion’s team with data-driven leadership. Whenever the right report wasn’t readily available, Patrik would whip up exactly the right graphs and charts to keep everyone aligned and informed.
The result: a working system and a strong foundation for the future
Orion’s case proves that even huge, complex SAP projects can succeed — as long as there is a partner who knows the technology inside out and genuinely understands the business. At its best, a partner provides both reassurance and practical support throughout every twist and turn of the project, even before the project officially kicks off.
In January 2025, Go-live brought years of work into production in one big leap, and the system worked from day one without major hiccups. During both Go-live and the intensive six-week hypercare phase that followed, Qalmari’s experts were fully hands-on, and thanks to Patrik, project leadership had full visibility throughout.
And when challenges inevitably arose, Qalmari’s skills clearly proved their value:
“Their expertise was truly one of a kind. Whenever an issue came up, they immediately knew where to start looking and what might be causing the problem,” Vainionpää explains.
Qalmari took full ownership of the outcome, showing that the project’s success mattered to them as much as it did to Orion. No one clocked out just because the workday was over. This flexibility and no-nonsense collaboration were genuinely appreciated by Orion.
The project also laid a solid foundation for the future. The new practices introduced will continue to support Orion, especially with the next big step already looming on the horizon: the shift to SAP Cloud ALM.
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