Companies can go it alone only for so long. Eventually they need help getting bigger.
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| SAP solutions help pharmaceutical distributor H. D. Smith analyze its codebase to find where the company can improve reliability, performance and scalability. |
“Systematizing ... your business may sound like common sense,” Inc. magazine states, “but it may require re-engineering and simplification to allow for your greatest growth.”
So how do you know when it’s time to get help?
“We had systems that were proprietary, and they served the company well,” David Guzmán, CIO of H. D. Smith, told SAP in a video. “But those systems reached the point where they were a barrier to the next level of growth.”
H. D. Smith serves about 12,000 pharmacies via distribution centers from Los Angeles to New York, and Boston to Miami. The Springfield, Ill.-based pharmaceutical distributor plans to eventually quadruple in size, which led to significant investments in the company’s future.
“We needed a stable platform that would allow us to launch a successful and scalable business,” Henry Dale Smith, Jr., chairman and CEO of H. D. Smith, told SAP in a video. “We wanted someone who would help us ... drive changes in our processes and improve us so that we could be more efficient.”
So H. D. Smith chose SAP MaxAttention, which offers long-term support for activities that span multiple years and projects. The MaxAttention team works with a company’s onsite support staff to constantly co-innovate and optimize the performance of SAP solutions.
“Having a partner like SAP allows us to connect better with other partners -- and that gives us credibility with the manufacturers specifically, but also with downstream customers,” Smith said. “If we’ve got a system that is bulletproof, then we’ve got something to sell.”
Follow Derek on Twitter: @DKlobucher
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