This is how Bausch & Lomb fixed its business continuity issues

Global eye health company Bausch & Lomb encountered motley of challenges while hosting applications from its on-premises datacenter. Involvement of multiple operating servers and the lack of expertise worsened the whole situation and made the venture impractical. They were not able to replace its outsourced database administrator (DBA) team to ensure best practices for managing its applications while avoiding the need to expand its in-house IT team. Their IT teams too were not able to focus on strategic IT initiatives and developing solutions to support portfolio expansion, instead were spending time on routine system administration and maintenance tasks.

The Challenges

Since IT management is required to ensure business continuity and minimize risks, the overall need for B&L was to revamp its IT strategy. They were in need to streamline their IT plan of action by having a systemized approach to maintain routine tasks such as reducing time to patch and upgrade Oracle applications to one week instead of taking two months.

Globally, healthcare providers are spending whooping figures on their IT initiatives to optimize their system performance, minimize disruption to business operations as well as enhance customer satisfaction. According to a Gartner report, Indian healthcare service providers were expected to spend $1.2 bn on IT products and services in 2015, an increase of 7% over 2014. This expenditure is likely to increase in times to come. Having their business priorities in mind, Bausch & Lomb too went a step ahead and rewrote their IT game action.

The Benefits

Since they were running Oracle E-Business Suite from its on-premises datacenter, the first step company decided was to adopt Oracle E-Business Suite Managed Cloud services with access to Oracle expertise. Kavita Bijlani, Senior Manager, IT, Bausch & Lomb said, “We decided to adopt Oracle services because it offered a cost-effective and flexible cloud management service with access to Oracle expertise, ensured minimal downtime and rapid support for system issues and allowed its IT team to spend more time on supporting new business priorities instead of technical issues.” She further added that they managed to complete the migration on time and within budget. Moreover, in case of any technical issues, the Oracle team resolved them quickly, ensuring no disruption to business operations.

The company also saved significant IT costs by eliminating floor space requirement for physical servers, hardware upgrade costs and DBA headcount. The migration also supported seamless office relocation and operational excellence by eliminating the need to transport and reinstall physical servers and ensuring hardware scalability to meet business demands.

With this migration, B&L also gained the flexibility to select the best cloud deployment model, without lock-in, and scale the IT infrastructure as the healthcare and pharmaceutical product business grows. Another benefit was the improved service level agreement by gaining priority support for internal service requests related to business-critical processes, such as sales and distribution of eye care products. This collaboration helped B&L ensured best practices across all technology layers and increased business process efficiency.