Separating a business-critical supply chain application while preserving trading integration
The Situation
Following a major divestment, a pharmaceutical distribution business needed to separate a complex enterprise application supporting ordering and supply chain operations shared with a retail pharmacy business.
The trading relationship would continue after separation: the distributor would still supply pharmaceutical orders to the retailer. Existing internal integration points therefore needed to become external business-to-business interfaces, introducing additional security, sensitive-data, firewall, network and regulatory considerations.
The Task
As Programme Manager, I was responsible for leading the technical separation within the wider programme, coordinating the teams and stakeholders needed to disentangle the application and its dependencies while maintaining the required trading integration.
The challenge was to establish a delivery approach that reflected the application’s complexity and minimised disruption to business-critical operations.
The Action / Approach
During discovery following the sign-off of the transition services agreement, we identified this application as the most complex element of the separation. I established a dedicated project stream with a focused team, giving its migration, dependencies and integration requirements the attention they needed.
I coordinated stakeholders and delivery teams across the application, infrastructure, network and security areas, bringing the separation and continuing B2B integration requirements together within the delivery approach.
We sequenced the migration through non-production environments first, before progressing to production, to reduce operational risk and minimise disruption.
The Result
The application and its dependencies were successfully separated, and B2B integration was implemented between the two organisations to support their continuing pharmaceutical ordering and supply relationship.
The dedicated delivery stream and staged migration approach enabled us to manage the complexity explicitly and complete the separation while minimising operational disruption.
