Boehringer Ingelheim is researching, developing, manufacturing and marketing pharmaceuticals worldwide. The company focuses on the business divisions Human Pharmaceuticals and Animal Health. For its global business connections with numerous subsidiaries, Boehringer Ingelheim needed a standard solution to create a qualified electronic signature for archived SAP documents. The objective was to destroy especially incoming original paper documents as soon as possible and to process only digital documents for an easier handling.
Savento accomplished the conception and implementation of the solution in close collaboration with its long-standing partner PBS Software GmbH. The resulting signature solution with its connection to an existing web service interface of the certification body was subsequently integrated in the PBS ContentLink standard, a lean connection between SAP and storage systems for data storage.
Solution
Based on a Content Repository, the signature and/or the time stamp service can now be activated for both incoming and outgoing archive documents. Signature files, signature and time stamp are archived as additional components together with the archive document in a Centera storage system. Savento has enhanced the solution with some SAP reports specifically for the requirements of the Italian subsidiaries. They are used to supply signature data offline to the tax authorities. Here, requirements have been implemented in compliance with the European tax authority standard.
Boehringer Ingelheim considers the facts that the signature solution integrated in PBS ContentLink can be managed from the SAP system and that no separate user interface is required as a great benefit. That way, it is easy to control if problems occur with the signature. For example, in the past extremely large documents could not be signed. The reason was that the certification body had limited the document size and that the value had to be increased in order to solve the problem.
Summary
The signature solution has been implemented in due time to the great satisfaction of Boehringer Ingelheim despite the tight project schedule. Boehringer Ingelheim is happy about the lean and also extremely flexible solution, which can be used differently depending on the requirements of the diverse subsidiaries. Thus, PBS ContentLink could establish itself as a global SAP archiving solution at Boehringer Ingelheim.
