Northgate Healthcare Packaging produces the pouches, lids and trays that keep medical devices and pharmaceuticals sterile from the factory to the operating room. Its customers include device makers and drug manufacturers that depend on consistent quality and complete traceability for every lot.
Years of growth, much of it through acquisition, left Northgate with nine manufacturing sites and almost as many ways of running them. Each plant had its own systems, its own quality records and its own approach to planning. To support its next stage of growth, Northgate chose Oraya® to implement a single cloud ERP across the entire network.
Challenges
Northgate’s leadership team was dealing with a range of issues that were becoming harder to manage:
- Several different ERP and quality systems across nine sites
- Lot traceability that relied on manual lookups across plants
- Inconsistent customer and material data that complicated shared accounts
- Slow, labor-intensive audit preparation for customer and regulatory inspections
- No consolidated view of capacity, inventory or profitability
Why Oraya
Northgate needed a partner that understood regulated manufacturing and could deliver a multi-site rollout without disrupting customers. Oraya proposed a global template based on SAP Cloud ERP best practices, validated once and deployed site by site. The team combined packaging and life sciences experience with a structured rollout method, and it worked alongside Northgate’s quality organization from the very first workshop so that validation was never an afterthought.
“Our customers audit us constantly. Having one validated system across every plant has changed how confident we feel walking into those meetings.”
— Chief Operating Officer, Northgate Healthcare Packaging
Implementation highlights
- A single global template for finance, procurement, manufacturing, quality and sales
- End-to-end batch traceability from resin and film suppliers to customer shipments
- Integrated quality management with inspection plans, certificates of analysis and deviation handling
- Harmonized material, customer and supplier master data across all sites
- A validation approach aligned with customer quality requirements and documented once for reuse at every site
- A rollout in three waves, with lessons from each wave built into the next
Outcome
All nine sites now operate on the same platform with the same processes. When a customer asks for the history of a lot, quality teams can answer in minutes instead of days. Planners balance work across plants using a shared view of capacity and inventory, and finance closes the books from one system instead of consolidating several.
Audit preparation has become far less disruptive, and customers have noticed the consistency. The shared template has also made growth simpler: when Northgate opened a new cleanroom line in Europe, the site went live on standard processes in a fraction of the time earlier integrations had taken. With a clean, standard core in place, Northgate is now evaluating analytics and AI capabilities to predict quality issues before they reach the line.
