Country: Global
Industry: Pharmaceutical
A pharmaceutical industry leader
Astra Zeneca is one of the world’s leading pharmaceutical companies, carrying out research and development that have led to life changing medications and vaccines. They are justly proud of their reputation for excellence, their international presence and their global stable of customers.
Business process challenges
However, when it came to operational efficiency and process management, Astra Zeneca faced some serious challenges:
- Their multi-national operation had resulted in de-centralised core business processes, including invoicing, bill payment and document management.
- Many processes were manually managed, and involved duplication and double handling, leading to considerable levels of inefficiency.
- They had no end-to-end visibility of their processes.
- They could not see the status of a process at any given time, or carry out analysis of its performance.
- These hurdles not only meant that the business was operating at less than optimal efficiency, but were adding unnecessary cost.
Identifying priorities for change
Astra Zeneca approached Toshiba’s partner, Newgen for a solution to these inefficiencies. Working together, they identified the four processes that were the highest priority, and which could add the greatest business value by being remodelled, streamlined and automated:
- Procure to pay – including standard purchase order (PO), non-PO invoicing, vendor master forms, and blanket POs.
- Sales order to cash – including invoice cancellation, and the incoming pay process.
- Records to report.
- Cash and bank process.
These processes touch 5,700 users across the company, in 30 countries, generating more than three million transactions.
The Newgen solution
The solution that was implemented for Astra Zeneca is built on three key elements of the Newgen Product Suite – OmniFlow, OmniScan and OmniDocs.
OmniScan has enabled Astra Zeneca to digitise all of their hardcopy invoices and receipts and to validate and de-duplicate the data before it is entered into Astra Zeneca’s ERP. Digitisation means that these documents can be processed using automated workflows, and the validation checking has significantly increased Astra Zeneca’s right-first-time (RFT) percentage and reduced errors.
OmniFlow provides Astra Zeneca with real-time automated workflow, so that invoices and receipts are directly to the right person or department for processing and approvals. This eliminates manual handling and significantly speeds up processing time and efficiency and reduces cost.
OmniDoc helps Astra Zeneca to manage documents efficiently, ensuring that they are accurately filed, can be searched and retrieved, and that they have the appropriate and compliant retention and archiving policies applied.
The outcomes
The Newgen solution has streamlined the way that Astra Zeneca processes invoices, receipts and end of month journal requests in multiple countries. It enforces alignment with Astra Zeneca’s standard operating procedures (SOPs), and provides a single, unified platform for all 5,700 users in multiple geographies. Astra Zeneca’s staff are empowered by the solution to collaborate and co-ordinate with their colleagues across the world, with a single platform and end-to-end visibility and transparency. Astra Zeneca has the assurance that the platform is fully scalable and will grow with their business to support them well into the future.
Astra Zeneca was advised to roll out the solution in a staged approach for maximum stability and so that they could use the learnings from each stage to improve and streamline the next. Starting with Asia Pacific (APAC), Astra Zeneca’s largest region in terms of users (56%) they then implemented in Middle East and Africa (MEA - 11% of users) before moving to the Americas (LATAM – with the remaining 33% of users).
Making a difference – overall benefits & metrics
- Overall streamlined processing of invoices, T&E receipts, month end journal requests in multiple countries in line with the company’s standard operating procedures.
- Scalable and a unified platform - 5700+ users using the platform across APAC, MEA, LATAM
- Smoother coordination and collaboration among stakeholders present in different countries
- Digitizing the hard copy invoices and receipts
- Validity and de-duplication check at the very first stage before entering any data or invoice into ERP. Hence, Improved FTR (right-first time) percentage
Higher number of Transactions being processed in all regions post the implementation of the Newgen Solution.
Delivering a frictionless customer experience
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