Boehringer Ingelheim Creates Standardized Process Foundation to Improve Compliance and Reduce Risk

Meet our customer

Boehringer Ingelheim is a biopharmaceutical company active in both human and animal health. As one of the industry’s top investors in research and development, the company focuses on developing innovative therapies that can improve and extend lives in areas of high unmet medical need. Independent since its foundation in 1885, Boehringer takes a long-term perspective, embedding sustainability along the entire value chain. Approximately 54,300 employees serve over 130 markets to build a healthier and more sustainable tomorrow.

 Learn more at www.boehringer-ingelheim.com.

A Long-Term Partnership

For more than a decade, Boehringer Ingelheim has relied on ARIS to underpin its global process management strategy. Originally introduced to support a worldwide SAP rollout, the platform has evolved into the organization’s central repository for process documentation, governance and validation, helping teams work consistently across business functions and geographies while supporting the rigorous compliance requirements of the pharmaceutical industry.

Building a Global Process Backbone

ARIS became the foundation for documenting standardized business processes throughout the SAP transformation. To create a consistent approach across individual teams and countries, Boehringer Ingelheim established common modelling standards, standardized roles and governance practices, ensuring every process designer worked in the same way.

The platform also supports automated generation of validation documentation, reducing manual effort and helping maintain consistency across regulated processes.

Using ARIS, 140 process designers from Boehringer Ingelheim modelled some 470 processes giving true end-to-end visibility of how business flows across the organization. Additionally, they created 3800 validation documents.

Today, the organization has also transitioned its long-standing ARIS environment to the cloud while maintaining the same proven approach to process management.

Driving Enterprise-wide Standardization

As the SAP programme has evolved, ARIS has continued to provide a consistent foundation for process governance. The platform is now used across multiple business domains, including manufacturing operations, quality, finance and supply chain, creating a common approach to process management across the enterprise.

Process designers work from shared standards and common governance, ensuring that process knowledge is created, maintained and shared consistently regardless of geography or function. Instead of every country developing its own documentation approach, Boehringer Ingelheim has used ARIS Connect to establish a single methodology to support harmonization while accommodating necessary local requirements across 62 different countries and 22 business units.

Reducing Manual Effort while Improving Compliance

One of the most valuable capabilities for Boehringer Ingelheim has been the automation of validation documentation. Previously, validation documentation would have required extensive manual work using Word documents. Today, documentation can be generated directly from ARIS, significantly reducing manual effort while lowering the risk of errors and ensuring greater consistency throughout the validation process.

“Without ARIS we would probably still be writing all our validation documents in Word. Now we maintain everything in ARIS, generate the documentation automatically and significantly reduce the manual work involved, while also reducing the risk of errors,” says Sonja Triquart from Global Business Services at Boehringer Ingelheim

Looking Ahead

Having relied on ARIS for more than a decade, Boehringer Ingelheim continues to see the platform as a stable foundation for enterprise process management.

As more business functions adopt common process governance, the organization will  extend the benefits of standardized modelling beyond the original SAP programme into other areas, creating an increasingly connected view of how work is performed across the business.

Boehringer Ingelheim is also actively assessing how to implement the ARIS CCL solution in order to help standardize process management and create a common language for process ownership, comparison and continuous improvement.