Highlights:
- 40 people working simultaneously in the SAP war room for 4 months
- Thousands of test scripts executed, tracked, and approved electronically
- 15+ projects now running in parallel using OpenText ALM across Lantheus
- Go-live achieved on time, fully validated, and ready for production
- Performance testing achieved transaction rates 18× above benchmarks
About Lantheus
Lantheus Medical Imaging, Inc. is a leading radiopharmaceutical-focused company with proven expertise in developing, manufacturing, and commercializing diagnostic and therapeutic products.
Challenge
Implementing SAP S/4HANA from scratch is hard enough. Doing it with paper-based validation, thousands of test scripts, manual signatures, physical routing, stringent GxP requirements and a hard go-live deadline makes an already complex project nearly impossible to manage. For a company operating in a highly regulated industry, the stakes couldn’t have been higher.
That’s the task the Lantheus testing team was faced with.
Using paper-based validation with thousands of test scripts and 40 people working simultaneously was not a viable solution for an ERP implementation of this level. “We would have had volumes and volumes and volumes of documentation,” says Dave Dentino, IT Director of Quality Systems at Lantheus. “There would have been no way of being able to execute the tests that we needed to execute in a timely manner.”
The process was not sustainable. Physical documents being routed from teammates, signatures needed, changes being tracked manually while maintaining a hard deadline was not possible. Something had to change so Lantheus turned to OpenText and VIP.
Solution: VIP + OpenText
Lantheus needed more than just software; they needed a partner who could move at their speed and deliver on their timeline. They found that in Visionary Integration Professionals (VIP), an OpenText Platinum Partner, with deep expertise in quality management and testing solutions.
With VIP’s support, the team at Lantheus implemented OpenText’s Core Application Quality Management system (formerly ALM) with custom e-signature capabilities. This made their paper signature workflow virtually disappear and allowed them to work more efficiently with executing tests digitally and gain visibility into each other’s tasks.
“The ability to have those scripts visible, the ability to make those scripts available to a multitude of folks”—this was the game-changer, according to Dentino. With this new solution, the team was able to eliminate bottlenecks, secure documents and maintain them, and gain clarity on testing scenarios across the team. The Lantheus team moved fast, stayed aligned, and trusted the process — even under the pressure of a four-month war room.
And when issues inevitably arose in a greenfield SAP implementation integrating multiple external systems, ALM’s defect module provided complete traceability with defects linked to configuration changes, every retest linked back to the original issue, every resolution documented before final approval.
On top of functional testing, Lantheus also needed performance validation of their new SAP environment. VIP utilized OpenText’s Professional Performance Engineering solution (formerly LoadRunner) to develop and execute scripts that reproduced key SAP Fiori business processes, ranging from sales order creation to general ledger posting. The tests simulated concurrent virtual users across five iterations, covering critical workflows such as order-to-cash, outbound delivery, and financial posting. Load levels gradually increased from 25% to 100% capacity. By the final run, the system sustained the full user load, achieving transaction rates more than 18 times higher than Lantheus’s benchmarks, while application server utilization remained below 25% of its maximum capacity.
The expedited nature that Lantheus was looking for from the performance testing was probably a little bit unrealistic, but those unrealistic expectations and goals were achieved. The guidance that we received from VIP and the expertise that we’ve received from VIP as well as the execution of those scripts was nothing less than exceptional.
– Dave Dentino, IT Director of Quality Systems, Lantheus
Results
The team at Lantheus was extremely happy with the results of going live on time, ready for production, and fully validated. “There’s absolutely no way that Lantheus would have achieved a go live on January 1 without using ALM and VIP’s support,” Dentino states.
The impact:
- 40 people working simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes
- Thousands of test scripts executed, tracked, and approved electronically
- Complete audit trail for GxP compliance; Requirements linked → tests linked → results
- Zero rework from VIP deliverables—right the first time, every time
Success breeds adoption. The CIO saw what happened with the SAP implementation and made a decision: OpenText ALM is now mandatory for all validation activities at Lantheus—GxP and non-GxP alike. Currently, Lantheus is running 15+ additional projects in parallel using the platform.