Directly from the maintenance schedule to the system

EUROAPI is one of the world's leading manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients. The Frankfurt site is the company's largest production and development center. © EUROAPI

All maintenance orders are generated from stored maintenance plans in the SAP system and are placed in the technicians' work queue, allowing for mobile on-site processing. © EUROAPI

All maintenance orders are generated from stored maintenance plans in the SAP system and appear in the technicians' work queue, allowing for mobile on-site processing. © EUROAPI

In the manufacturing of active pharmaceutical ingredients, precision is not an option but a requirement. This applies to production and everything that keeps it running. Maintenance of the company's own technology is part of daily business for EUROAPI. Annually, the company handles around 25,000 maintenance orders across 80,000 technical objects – and doing so mobilly, digitally, and directly at the equipment.

EUROAPI is one of the world's leading manufacturers of active pharmaceutical ingredients. At the Frankfurt site, where both production and development of active ingredients are carried out, the strictly regulated GMP1 environment applies. Every step must be documented without gaps. This documentation process in maintenance should become more efficient and capable of being performed mobilely. Together with mindsquare, EUROAPI implemented a solution based on SAP Fiori and fully integrated it into the existing SAP system landscape.

Active worldwide from Frankfurt

The company originated from the Sanofi group and now operates sites in France, Hungary, Italy, and Germany. The product portfolio includes around 200 active ingredients delivered to customers in over 50 countries. The Frankfurt site specializes in the production and development of small chemical active ingredients as well as peptides and oligonucleotides, and is among the largest and most complex locations of the company, with five plants, a warehouse, and building technology. What this means for maintenance quickly becomes clear: maintenance processes in this environment are not routine operations. Many individual tasks add up to a highly structured process that must be traceable at every point. An example is the calibration process in process control technology: measuring points such as temperature sensors are tested for functionality at defined intervals. The measurement values must be documented directly and without gaps. Incorrect measurements can cause the manufacturing process to deviate from specifications. In such cases, the produced batch is unusable.

All these orders are generated from stored maintenance plans in the SAP system and land in the technicians' work queue. "For example, during centrifuge maintenance, we completely disassemble a large-volume plant, check the bearings, replace seals. It's labor-intensive work, and each step must be properly documented in the system," says Sebastian Gsimbsl, Administration Systems, who accompanied the project at EUROAPI Frankfurt. The data basis for this was previously in the SAP system. What was missing was access to this data in real-time where the work actually takes place: at the equipment itself. Therefore, work orders had to be printed, issued, and then processed back into the system. "According to GMP requirements, we are obliged to archive original documents for up to eleven years. This meant high time and resource expenditure with the paper process," Gsimbsl explains. Digital documentation of process workflows is particularly advantageous because, for example, temperature sensor readings are available system-side from the moment of entry during testing and can be long-term tracked in GMP-compliant manner.

Integration instead of isolated solutions

"It was clear early on which direction the solution should go. All data is stored in our SAP system. A system break would have required data transfer, which we wanted to avoid," says Gsimbsl. The SAP consulting and development firm mindsquare introduced a convincing template-based approach: the solution based on SAP Fiori was tailored individually to EUROAPI's processes, industry, and terminology. In the GMP environment, strict rules also apply regarding the requirements a system environment must meet. Each function of the application was tested and formally approved separately before being integrated into EUROAPI's ongoing SAP landscape. The pharmaceutical manufacturer will use the solution fully autonomously in the future as part of a one-time purchase. After implementation, it is entirely in the company's hands, without ongoing license costs or contractual dependencies.

Mobile devices make the difference

The daily use of mobile devices is now literally in the hands of technicians: as an app on the tablet, directly at the equipment. When calling up an order, they immediately see which spare parts are compatible, whether they are available in stock, and can reserve them on-site. Measurement data are recorded at the moment they are generated, and photos can be added directly to the order. "From the start, we had the impression that we were in good hands with mindsquare and that the implementation would go as we envisioned. On a personal level, our contacts just clicked," summarizes Gsimbsl. Each technician logs in with their familiar SAP user account. No one had to get used to a new system or logic.

The response among technicians was quick. Whether young or experienced: the time savings are noticeable for everyone and immediately reflected in daily operations. One example makes this particularly tangible: where employees previously spent days working from home to manually document maintenance or repair work, this effort has now simply disappeared. "The acceptance is there because the benefit was immediately visible," says Gsimbsl.

For EUROAPI, this is a successful start for further projects: the solution is already being rolled out to additional European sites, and processes beyond preventive maintenance are in planning stages.

1 GMP (Good Manufacturing Practice) refers to compliance with strict quality and documentation standards in production.