IS&T Spotlight:
The Broad Institute: Ready for SAP in June 2006
Why SAP at the Broad?
The Broad Institute is administered through MIT under the founding
collaboration agreement between MIT, Harvard University and Harvard-affiliated
hospitals, and the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research
(WIBR). The Broad had already fully integrated its administrative
systems into MIT and particularly SAP, but its high-throughput
platform activities required a robust, flexible and highly scalable
solution to grow with its expansions into multiple new areas and
projects. To support Broad initiatives in production processing
and stock keeping, and to replace an existing third-party interface
that was not fully integrated into financial systems, the Broad
Institute selected SAP’s Manufacturing Resource Planning
(MRP) suite.
The implementation includes the following SAP modules:
- Materials Management
- Production Processes
- Quality Management
- Product Costing
- Interfaces with the Broad’s Process Information System
It is expected that the development
of these tools for the Broad will have wider application potential
in other areas of MIT.
Project Team: Partnership between The Broad Institute
and Information Services & Technology
The Broad Institute and MIT’s Student and Administrative
Information Services (SAIS) have jointly implemented SAP MRP at
the Broad. The project is led by both a Broad Project Manager and
a Project Manager from IS&T. The implementation team consists
of key users from the Broad Institute, SAP experts from SAIS, and
a few key consultants. The project, kicked off in November 2005,
is scheduled to go live on schedule and under budget on June 20,
2006.
With SAP’s tight integration to business processes and
the unusual application of standard manufacturing processes within
a pure research environment, the project is challenging and complex.
The end result is a modified manufacturing implementation that
preserves flexibility and ease of use while supporting enhanced
inventory tracking, limited product and project costing, quality
management, and process order management.
About the Broad
The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was
founded in 2003 to bring the power of genomics to biomedicine.
It pursues
this mission by empowering creative scientists to construct new
and robust tools for genomic medicine, to make them accessible
to the global scientific community, and to apply them to the
understanding and treatment of disease.
The Institute, governed jointly by MIT and Harvard, is a research
collaboration that involves faculty, professional staff and
students throughout the MIT and Harvard academic and medical communities.
Organized around Scientific Programs and Scientific Platforms,
the unique structure of the Broad Institute enables scientists
to collaborate on transformative projects across many scientific
and medical disciplines.
Feedback
For more information on the ASAP implementation of SAP at the
Broad Institute, write to Bob Romanowicz at rroman@mit.edu. |
