The Meridian building, located next to Avenida Meridina, in the Can Dragó area, has housed a digital hub for the French pharmaceutical group Sanofi since 2016, which has 73 production centers in 32 countries. These facilities were launched in 2016 and have not stopped growing since then, reaching a staff of 300 highly qualified professionals from 40 nationalities. According to the company, 65% of the team is under 40 years old and 23% under 30. Likewise, 57% are men and 43% are women. Far from considering the staff complete, Sanofi has announced that in 2022 it will incorporate 100 new professionals into the Global Innovation Center in Barcelona, thus increasing the staff by more than 80% between 2020 and 2022.
"Barcelona is now a true talent incubator for Sanofi and the region," highlights Alex Press, Global Supply Chain Digital Leader of the biopharmaceutical company, thus reaffirming its commitment to the Catalan capital. This announcement by Sanofi joins those recently made by other large international corporations, such as Pepsico, which will locate its global reference digital hub in Cornellà de Llobregat, or Microsoft, which will open an R&D center in artificial intelligence in Barcelona, among other examples.
To fill the 100 jobs it plans to create, Sanofi is mainly looking for experts in the areas of data management, machine learning, SAP, and software development. All of them will join one of the multiple strategic digital transformation programs that Sanofi executes from Barcelona for central business areas in the company such as the finance department or supply chain management.
Specifically, the hub began its activity in 2016 with the launch of iShift, a program for continuous optimization of Sanofi's financial and manufacturing processes. This tool has become the group's largest ERP (management software) in less than five years and already manages 35% of the pharmaceutical company's revenue, although the challenge is to reach 100% by 2025. The iShift technology developed in Barcelona already processes daily sales of 110 million euros in nine countries, has been implemented in ten factories and ten distribution centers, and processes more than 5,000 transactions per day.
The other major pillar of the Meridian building's center, the SCCore Program, revolves around optimizing the supply chain in all countries where the company operates; it is software that allows, for example, demand planning, production management, logistics, or inventory reduction. It has already been implemented in 96 markets and 34 production centers. The goal is for it to be used by three of Sanofi's four global business units by 2022.
SCCore and iShift are the two major transformation programs that led the pharmaceutical company to launch this center in Barcelona, but the hub has been taking on new functions and today also has the mission to "develop the backbone of the digital transformation" of the group, which implies developing systems that allow "making practical decisions in real time based on the data provided by all business units." In this sense, a Global Digital Data Organization has been located in Barcelona with the mission of making Sanofi "a first-class organization in artificial intelligence" by extracting the maximum value and potential from data.
Headquartered in Paris, Sanofi had a turnover of 36,041 million euros in 2020, up 3.3%. With its headquarters in Barcelona's Torre Diagonal Mar, the Spanish subsidiary employs some 1,200 people and has a factory in Riells i Viabrea (Girona) specializing in tablets and capsules.
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