Testing played a more crucial role at Ranbaxy's upgrade because compliance is key to the pharmaceutical major

India's largest pharmaceutical company, the Rs 4,400- odd crore Ranbaxy has a complex IT fabric. Most of those locations run on a single instance of SAP 4.6c version of R/3 ran on a 32-bit windows 2003 environment and SQL 2000 with database of about 2.25 Terabytes, growing at about 45 GB a month. Transactions were growing with the business, and by 2008, about 70 percent of the people with access to the system - were using the ERP concurrently, on 2,500 custom-built programs and about 900 types of transactions .Briskman and team decided to overhaul the entire ecosystem, upgrading the hardware, the software including the operating system, the database and the ERP platform. SAP ECC6 was soon running on more efficient.

Most CIOs would hire a consultant at this stage but Briskman lead his team to the more risky alternative, DIY." We have been doing rollouts and upgrades without any consulting help and decided that this project should be no different," says Briskman.