Pharmaceutical & healthcare

Finance / Procurement redesign for a multinational pharmaceutical

A worldwide leader in pharmaceuticals wanted to improve their finance organization and its interactions with other support functions. The goal was to enhance service quality for both internal and external customers, and potentially identify additional services the organization could offer.

Challenge
The pharmaceutical has an array of customers, including hospitals, pharmacies, and animal health providers. As a result, finance processes had grown complex and sometimes duplicative. The company asked A.T. Kearney to help identify and plan for improvement opportunities related to:

Eliminating low value activities and overlaps/duplications
Identifying and assessing new value-added services
Recommending how the new services could best be provided

Approach
The team first assessed current processes and sub-processes, detailing task drivers, volume of tasks, and improvement opportunities. Once the gaps were identified and the internal service levels agreed on by key stakeholders, the new processes and organizational model were designed. This phase included detailed process maps, process documentation, and task alignment. The team also developed a detailed transition plan.

Results
The initiative has produced significant results for the pharmaceutical company. Most significantly, the company has improved service quality to key hospitals, as evident by the reduced number of customer complaints.

In addition, the company has a plan to increase the volume of purchases managed by the procurement function, extending the service to new therapeutic areas. These procurement improvements will enhance the quality of service to all of Finance’s internal customers.

At the same time that services were being added, the team identified ways to streamline processes that would reduce the equivalent of 20% of the organization’s staff. To date implemented improvements have resulted in half of these reductions.