A global pharmaceutical company with U.S. headquarters in Cambridge, MA enlisted Stratos Consulting to work with its Strategic Sourcing and Procurement department to create customized Tableau dashboards. The increase in contract negotiation power and productivity as a result of this project is estimated to save the company $1M annually.
The Challenge
A classic case of disparate and siloed systems and unique processes across the whole spectrum of Procure to Pay, from invoice payments and travel and expense (T&E) to enterprise contract management system (ECMS) severely limited the Strategic Sourcing and Procurement team’s visibility into actual spend, potential supplier risks, negotiation power, and the ability to make comparisons across their supplier network.
How Stratos Consulting Helped
Through multiple working sessions with the pharmaceutical company’s Strategic Sourcing and Procurement team, Stratos:
- Built a data warehouse that integrated data from Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), SAP, Concur, Icertis ECMS, and Dun & Bradstreet
- Created Tableau dashboards to show spend-to-date, open points of sales, invoices, and supplier risk factors
- Established a process for maintaining the pharmaceutical business’s supplier and mappings and developed governance processes for data management, routine maintenance, and error handling
“This was a very collaborative project that brought to bear an excellent balance of technical system design and subject matter expertise. It involved a lot of different teams and SMEs, and Stratos was able to quickly understand and translate technical details to layman’s terms for our business — and help me and the business connect the dots.”
– Director of Strategic Sourcing
The Result
The Supplier 360 Analytics Platform has benefited the entire Strategic Sourcing team by enabling more accurate and timely supplier spend and risk analysis on a day-to-day basis. With the ability to easily run ad-hoc reports and pull supplier-related information, the team saw a significant reduction in time to complete tasks and boost in efficiency.
“With the Supplier 360 Analytics Platform, sourcing can now quickly perform analysis and assessments and take action based on real-time insights. We have seen an increase in team productivity contributing to our overall success and in the long term we expect $1M in cost savings annually.”
Supplier 360 has given the Sourcing team a leg up in the recent merger as all affiliate companies are now on one Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) system; the flexible design of the solution has allowed it to easily handle the influx of additional data.
“This project wouldn’t have been successful without the collaborative approach of Stratos and their ability to identify new systems and easily analyze and translate business and technical requirements. Huge kudos to the Stratos team — I 100% recommend them!”
– Director of Strategic Sourcing
If you are looking for a consulting team to provide guidance on developing the right strategies for using data and technology to improve your business operations and drive growth, contact us today.
