MISHRA: How do you describe Cognitus Consulting for the community of Life Sciences?
AHLAWAT: Cognitus was one of the first companies in North America to enable S/4Hana conversion with FDA Compliance for Life Science. We have a critical emphasis on Computer Software Validation. Our customer-compliant, audit-ready solutions include CGxP Risk Assessment, Compliance Triage and Process Optimization, which deliver 21 CFR Part 11 compliant documentation, implementation, testing, and training.
MISHRA: Recognizing that migration to SAP/4HANA is a compelling need of many businesses with ERP systems, how do you differentiate yourself as an enabler of an economical and timely transformation?
AHLAWAT: For most Industry segments, Cognitus has a pre-built configuration template that reduces development time, reducing cost for our customers. Our Gallop Pilot offers a trial before the customer buys the solution package, where we perform trial migration of customer’s Sandbox/QA and leverage SAP trial licenses. This helps build business confidence on what they are getting, analyze the benefits, and help scope the deployment project. Gallop pilot is typically implemented in 30 days, at a fixed price depending on the size of customer instance. It provides a low touch, low pain instance that business get to assess, containing their existing processes and data in S/4HANA and explore new features available. We have found this step to greatly improve customer participation during implementation.
MISHRA: Life Sciences faces an enormous challenge of ensuring compliance with FDA for drug development, what is the specific nature of your solution to optimize the interface between the drug company and the regulatory body?
AHLAWAT: The SAP of today is very vast. That could include CRM solution, Post Market Surveillance solution, Supplier Quality Management Systems, Perform Audit, Environment Health & Safety in SAP. Even if not SAP, we have a lot of experience working on SAP PI/PO that allows business to seamlessly integrate SAP to their Quality and Regulatory Compliance systems like EDMS, LIMS, TrackWise and PTC windchill. We also have experience with EDI Integration for regulatory submissions, like eMDR, EUDAMED, PMDA. We support competent authority reporting for all major regions in the world.
MISHRA: COVID-19 exposed the vulnerability of the supply chain of healthcare, what do you recommend for digital transformation to achieve resilience?
AHLAWAT: COVID-19 has changed the way industry does business. At the beginning of the pandemic, many of our projects were impacted. One of our largest accounts out of Bay area suspended project implementation, which meant that we suddenly had about 50 fulltime offshore employees that were non-billable. Rather than laying off anybody, we deferred salaries after taking employee consent to tide over immediate cash crunch. But more than that, we put all those employees to work on building an Industry specific solution template as a configurable solution that can be licensed.
MISHRA: The industry is overwhelmed with patient and drug/therapy data during clinical trials as well as commercial manufacturing and distribution. How can intelligence be extracted from the disparate data in numerous silos?
AHLAWAT: A single enterprise level integrated platform provided by S/4HANA platform manages the end-to-end product-lifecycle. Pre-built modules in Cognitus's life science template, integrated with Power-BI and Cloud Analytics, provides a business dashboard and integrated reports containing data from multitude sources, like LIMS, LiveHire and others.
We have small team at Cognitus dedicated to building chatbots, RPA solutions. We have executed SAP transaction directly from Microsoft Teams. A simple case, like a user communicating with travel assistant chatbot in teams to record and file expense claims within SAP. We have Billing Clerk chatbot that helps accounts to generate invoice and reconcile payments with invoices without ever having to log into SAP GUI.
Cognitus was the 1st prize winner of the SAP Hackbot 2019 event where we demonstrated integration of LiveHire and SAP SuccessFactors.
MISHRA: Knowing that you are an international enterprise, how have you made resources available to clients in the major markets of the world?
AHLAWAT: Cognitus has 14 delivery and support centers across the world, spanning all time zones. We have the capability to provide onsite level service at offsite or near site in a manner that a customer expects. Our implementation experience, knowledge of SAP solutions and the commitment to the customer define us.
