About the Client
Colorcon is a global provider of pharmaceutical technologies, specialty excipients, film coating systems, and related materials used across healthcare and nutrition markets. The business runs a make-to-order demand model, which means planning must respond closely to actual order patterns rather than rely on a simple make-to-stock setup.
Its operating environment is highly complex, with roughly 700 raw materials supporting more than 5,000 formula or recipe combinations.
Business Challenges
- Colorcon needed to strengthen planning and production scheduling in its dry dispersions business while also aligning with a broader ERP modernisation direction.
- A large amount of work before manufacturing was still manual, especially in preparing and scheduling batches, which created delay, repetition, and avoidable dependency on people.
- The business wanted to improve utilisation of processes, assets, and plant capacity while supporting wider goals around efficiency, automation, and customer responsiveness.
- The existing Oracle EBS landscape had to be examined carefully, because moving it as-is into a future platform would have carried heavy redesign effort and risk.
- The real challenge was to improve planning performance now without forcing a transformation route that would be expensive, disruptive, and poorly timed.
What We Did
- We spent significant time understanding Colorcon’s operating model, planning realities, and technology landscape rather than jumping straight to a system recommendation.
- We reviewed the current Oracle EBS environment and concluded that a direct transformation of the existing setup was not the right move, given the scale of re-engineering it would require and the risk of carrying obsolete design forward.
- Instead, we proposed a more practical hybrid future-state path that would improve planning outcomes now while keeping the long-term cloud direction intact.
- The solution approach included extracting booked sales orders from Oracle EBS, consolidating them into a clearer demand picture, and passing that demand into Oracle Fusion Cloud for supply planning.
- We also defined an implementation path built around global design first, then phased deployment across sites, so the business could standardise core planning processes while managing necessary local variation in a controlled way.
Value Delivered
- The work gave Colorcon a clear and realistic path forward, one that supported immediate operational improvement without forcing premature full-scale transformation.
- It set the basis for more consistent planning and scheduling across sites through a standard global model that could be tested, approved, and deployed with confidence.
- By reducing manual steps and avoidable inefficiencies, the approach aimed to lower labour effort, improve operating discipline, and reduce process friction.
- It created a stronger foundation for ERP modernisation by linking short-term planning improvement with the longer-term move to Oracle Fusion Cloud.
- Just as importantly, it helped Colorcon avoid the cost and disruption of taking forward a design that was not fit for the future, while still preparing the business for more advanced planning and automation later.