Releasing $300k in cash by improving the Purchase-to-Invoice process

Finance Success Story

Reviewing their Purchase-to-Invoice processes through Process Mining has allowed a major pharmaceutical group to get results beyond expectations within 4 weeks and release $300K in cash at the end of the first part of the journey.

Context

In an industry evolving in a very competitive B2B2C environment, our client, a North American pharmaceutical group, needs to be stay proactive in the improvement of its corporate processes. The company, specialized in innovative solutions for the health care industry, has subsidiaries over the world, who serve +200,000 business clients, with the support of thousands of suppliers.

In a context of operational excellence rethinking, the Group’s financial management team decided to review their finance processes, as they had identified the overall service was not performing efficiently at worldwide level. For the project lead: “We knew we needed to improve our finance process efficiencies and the productivity of our teams, by looking to how they were working”.

Process Mining Finance Pharma

Defining the Process Mining business scope

Decision has been made to begin the transformation journey with a pilot on their Purchase-to-Invoice (P2I) processes, more specifically:

  • the changes in the sales orders process, with a focus on carts abandon,
  • the payments of the sales orders, with a focus on the financial source changes.

Results in just 4 weeks!

Teaming with Livejourney, the Group’s financial management team has built the workflows and the processes matrix, which allowed our firm’s experts to set-up the analysis of the overall Purchase-to-Invoice process, based on a “in-house” system. As defined in the roadmap, a specific attention has been paid on the real time processes related to cart abandonment and orders payment. In a four-week sprint, our Process Mining solution has allowed identify:

Several sets of reworks, at different stages of the process

Specific deviations such as complex loops

Execution (long time) stops

A further in-depth analysis of some of the most important deviances & their root causes allowed highlight the processes that required a huge amount of time for corrective actions, and the suppliers for which a specific follow-up observation was needed.

With the first results brought through this specific Process Mining project, our client’s management team was able to implement an interesting Change Management journey, along with their financial local teams who helped us understand the deviances. By testing scenarios and following them in real time through Process Intelligence, they were able to improve the efficiency of their Purchase-to-Invoice processes within 4 months.

Key figures

0 weeks
for the a first detailed analysis
+ 0 %
of process compliance for the sales orders process
+ € 0 K
saved in 6 months