Clinical trials are an essential means to ensure patients’ safety and drug efficacy. One of the most critical steps of a successful clinical trial is how the trial is designed, planned, and executed. The smooth management of clinical supplies is crucial to avoid any delay in medication delivery to patients or supply shortages while at the same time not producing costly overages and wastage.   

For these reasons, SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management has been developed as a frontrunner for the Industry Cloud for Life Sciences providing support for end-to-end clinical process operations, and visibility to plan, source, manufacture, distribute and reconcile supplies for clinical R&D.  

To cover customer needs best, SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management has been designed as a cloud solution integrating with an SAP S/4HANA add-on:  

• Two modules of SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management are cloud modules based on SAP BTP covering study management, planning and demand forecasting.  
• Two modules of SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management are part of an SAP S/4HANA Life Sciences add-on covering the specific blinding and randomization needs for clinical trials to facilitate manufacturing, packaging, labelling, and shipments of clinical supplies. 

Release Schedule

• Every year, releases are planned for Q2 and Q4.  
• Every release will support two SAP S/4HANA back-end releases at a time, which will be the SAP S/4HANA release where it was originally implemented AND the succeeding SAP S/4HANA release.
• There will be only one cloud release live in production at any point in time which is always the most recent generally available cloud release. In case customers do not upgrade to the latest compatible SAP S/4HANA version, an interoperability of new cloud releases towards older supported SAP S/4HANA releases will be provided but there will be of course a limitation to the functional scope as supported by their installed SAP S/4HANA release.  

SAP Intelligent Clinical Supply Management provides two customer environments, STAGING and into the production environment for productive use accordingly.  

Each cloud release follows a standardized sequence of events: 

• Day x: Staging Deployment
• Day x+2 months: Production Deployment  

 SAP S/4HANA Life Science add-on releases are available for download at the RTC date.  

The list below shows past release dates and the upcoming release schedule (DISCLAIMER: This is the current state of planning and may be changed by SAP at any time without notice):