Cerapedics Savors Support and Visibility with SAP S/4HANA

Cerapedics relieves pain and improves quality of life for people around the world with their proprietary bone graft putty. The biotechnology company’s i-FACTOR Peptide Enhanced Bone Graft is the only biologic bone graft in orthopedics that incorporates a small peptide as an attachment factor to stimulate the natural bone healing process. As the company grew, Cerapedics realized their ERP needed to evolve, too. They approached Avvale, seeking to strengthen the backbone of their enterprise as they digitally transform.

“It wasn’t even close,” Karen Minniear, Cerapedics’ Director of Logistics said. “In our due diligence, we found Avvale was consistently mentioned and referenced. We were told by multiple reputable sources that Avvale was the provider that was best suited to handle implementation of this new solution.”

The Challenge

An outdated ERP system that was supported remotely through a third-party was no longer serving the Cerapedics team. Expecting major growth over the next several years, Cerapedics required a solution that would accommodate their compact IT footprint, enabling scalable, in-house warehouse operations located in the cloud.

Edward Sawyer, Cerapedics’ General Manager, was looking for a solution that improved business processes and also remained in their budget. “For us, [we were looking to improve] almost everything under our operations. It was the finance – that’s always a big area of any ERP system. But for us it was also the manufacturing – being able to track production orders and really being able to understand our costs and our costing. A big area for us was [also] our sales order processing and utilizing [a] system that connects us with our clients so that we could process orders, invoice, and collect. Being funded by venture capital [we needed a] platform that is cost effective.”

The Approach

Cerapedics partnered with Avvale to implement SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud Edition, allowing the company to digitize their systems and transform with a highly integrated and intelligent Cloud ERP. Touting features such as decision support via natively embedded AI and central business configuration, S/4 Public Cloud became the clear platform of choice for innovation. Leveraging S/4 Public Cloud’s extensibility in conjunction with SAP’s Best Practices principles, our team paved the way for Cerapedics to improve their operations and take advantage of real-time analytics.

The Impact

With S/4HANA Cloud, Cerapedics possesses the stability and functionality to scale with rapid growth. In addition, the company now enjoys easier access to sales order information, real-time analytics for informed decision making, and improved financial reporting – all in an industry-leading solution that has been created specifically for easy adoption.

Apart from the improved overall functionality, one of the major benefits of S/4HANA Cloud was the actual speed of the successful implementation, Sawyer said. “I was amazed at how quickly we were able to implement this platform. We had very limited downtime in terms of reporting; the actual interruption to our business was limited. From starting a 5-month development process to then going live; we were able to close the books within a few weeks.”

by Avvale