IBM SOA - Cardinal Health partners with IBM to provide top-notch healthcare.

IBM SOA - Cardinal Health partners with IBM to provide top-notch healthcare. IBM SOA customer - SOA in Healthcare industry

“Our partnership with IBM is not just about hardware and software. In the end it’s about helping our custom­ers fulfill their mission of providing better health care to people around the world.” - Jeanne Lasheff, Vice President Application Services, Enterprise IT, Cardinal Health

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: Cardinal Health
Deployment Country: United States
Industry: Healthcare, Wholesale Distribution & Services

IBM SOA Solution: Autonomic Computing, Database Management, Enabling Business Flexibility, Information On Demand, Service Oriented Architecture

Overview
Cardinal Health is a US$81 billion global health care company, with 55,000 employees and operations in 29 countries on six continents. Cardinal Health is rated number 19 on Fortune Magazine’s list of the 500 largest U.S. companies. Cardinal Health manufactures, packages and distributes pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, offers a wide range of clinical services, and develops products that improve the management and delivery of supplies to hospitals, physician offices and pharmacies.

Business need: Cardinal Health recently began to transition from a holding company to an integrated operating company so that it could go to market with integrated solutions in supply chain management, medication management, clinical services and manufacturing. The new company vision led to a redesign of IT operations away from a business-unit focus and toward a company-wide IT service provider, with greater data integration, flexible access and delivery.

IBM SOA Solution: The solution incorporates IBM middleware, hardware, tools, services and technical support. Cardinal Health’s new infrastructure will be built around a service oriented architecture (SOA) model to increase its flexibility, responsive­ness and performance.

Benefits: OGTP and the SAP applications Cardinal Health has selected to deploy will be powered by the new DB2 9 data server, which is optimized to run SAP applications. The Cardinal Health DBA staff and BASIS development teams will both take advantage of the autonomic features of DB2 9, which make administrative tasks more seamless and transparent. In addition, Cardinal Health expects the new deep compression feature of DB2 9 to provide significant savings in storage hardware and associated costs.

Case Study Overview

Cardinal Health
Dublin, Ohio, United States
www.cardinal.com

Industries
• Healthcare
• Wholesale Distribution & Services

Products

• IBM DB2® 9 data server
• mySAP™ Business Suite applications
• IBM WebSphere BusinessIntegration software
• IBM WebSphere® Portal software
• IBM WebSphere CustomerCenter software
• IBM Rational® tools
• IBM System p™ servers
• IBM System x™ servers
• IBM System Storage™ technology
• IBM Global Services

“Our partnership with IBM is not just about hardware and software. In the end it’s about helping our customers fulfill their mission of providing better health care to people around the world.”
—Jeanne Lasheff, Vice President Application Services, Enterprise IT, Cardinal Health

Background
Cardinal Health is a US$81 billion global health care company, with 55,000 employees and operations in 29 countries on six continents. Cardinal Health is rated number 19 on Fortune Magazine’s list of the 500 largest U.S. companies.

Cardinal Health manufactures, packages and distributes pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, offers a wide range of clinical services, and develops products that improve the management and delivery of supplies to hospitals, physician offices and pharmacies.

Every day, Cardinal Health:

• Manufactures more than 4 million medical/surgical products that are used by 90 percent of all hospitals in the United States
• Manufactures more than 500 million doses of pharmaceuticals
• Makes 50,000 deliveries to 40,000 customer sites

Challenge
Cardinal Health recently began to transition from a holding company to an integrated operating company so that it could go to market with integrated solutions in supply chain management, medication management, clinical services and manufacturing. The new company vision led to a redesign of IT operations away from a business-unit focus and toward a company-wide IT service provider, with greater data integration, flexible access and delivery.

Last year, Cardinal Health committed to a multi-year migration to a standard, company-wide ERP system from SAP® as a key component to align business processes across the company. At the same time, Cardinal Health launched its One Global Technology Platform (OGTP) project. OGTP provides the technology infrastructure to support and enhance the SAP deployment enterprise-wide. Cardinal Health chose IBM as its strategic partner for OGTP, to help transform its technology environment quickly by implementing a robust infrastructure that would enable future growth, keep IT operating costs low and mitigate technology transformation risks.

SOA Solution
The solution incorporates IBM middleware, hardware, tools, services and technical support. Cardinal Health’s new infrastructure will be built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model to increase its flexibility, responsive­ness and performance.

Benefits
OGTP and the SAP applications Cardinal Health has selected to deploy will be powered by the new DB2 9 data server, which is optimized to run SAP applications. The Cardinal Health DBA staff and BASIS development teams will both take advantage of the autonomic features of DB2 9, which make administrative tasks such as installation and performance monitoring and tuning more seamless and transparent. In addition, Cardinal Health expects the new deep compression feature of DB2 9 to provide significant savings in storage hardware and associated costs.

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System p, System x
Software: WebSphere Customer Center, DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX and Windows, WebSphere Portal, Rational Suite
Services: IBM Global Services