Situation and Complexities:
The Pharmaceutical Company like most other corporations used manual budgetary controls across its corporate office and 32 branches. The control measures were post mortem as spend incurred had manual checks and approvals. Voluminous quantity of emails and couriers traversed the organization for approval requirements and documentation/ audits. This also resulted in poor productivity and internal customer dissatisfaction. Promotion plans and projects got delayed. The accounts payable team had difficulty in passing the payments, tracking the budget and also adhering to the policies. Feasibility of the manual checks to meet audit and compliance requirements was a big issue as the transactions were large in numbers. Sourcing was a concern as spend was scattered. Tracking and reporting of expenses was poor and delayed. The growth in business and the related cost management requirements needed company wide computerization going up to the grass root level.
Target:
The principal target was to reach a 100% electronic bill processing and payment capability for all the branches and corporate office. The vendor and employee payment transaction in the central cell had to be made paperless. In sourcing there was a need to categorize mainly the promotional spend/ expenses and have centralized contracts governing spend behavior.
BAZ Implementation:
The BAZ implementation mainly revolved around the deployment of the Budget, Procure to Pay, Vendor Management, Contract Management, Non PO Invoices, Expenses and CTC reimbursements module. It was handled by a 2 member functional team of the client, supported by an IT member and Empronc member. On completion of the scoping exercise, the team agreed to use an 8 tier budget cascade (Company, Division, Function, Segment, Product, Activity, Zone and Location).
The solution of on-line scoring of the budget against requisitions was deployed and mandated across the business. Special features like budget roll-up, budget approval/ reallocation work flows, budget reporting etc. made compliance simple and total.
The go-live was smooth and incident free for corporate office and all the branches.
Benefits:
The client now processes electronic claims daily. This is at 100% adherence. The tracking of the documents is on real time basis (powered by the document upload features of BAZ). This is additionally supported by 70 transactional reports for various groups. Employee reimbursements have become paperless. All spend categories including non PO based vendor payments have been categorized for spend and sourcing management. The largest beneficiary has been the Sales and Marketing team, especially with respect to the promotional items approval, sourcing, distribution and accounting. The issue of duplicate vendor invoices is now non existent. BAZ has comfortably e-enabled the entire Finance and Procurement requirements. Audit trails and compliance benefits have been reaped.
The senior management effectively uses the budget e-reports for day to day management- a first in the pharma industry. The icing on the cake would be when next year budget numbers get electronically structured and made using the historical information/ categorization/ structured accounts in BAZ! |
