A recent case study developed by Spend Matters details how a North American and global procurement organization for a top five pharmaceutical company applied a defined exercise and solution implementation from Lavante to discover where it had excess risk exposure, lack of policy compliance, overpayments and other cost driving issues. The procurement organization, which primarily focused on order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, credit and collections was ultimately able to trace all of its challenges in these areas back to weak or missing vendor data.
As the case study details, the company already had some of its vendor data under active management, but many vendor data points required enhanced management. Critical data with inaccuracies included: remit-to addresses, parent child connections, duplicate vendor entries and incomplete fields including TIN, email and fax numbers.
If the organization had embarked on its data cleansing efforts internally, the benefits would not have cost-justified the task. As such, it decided to work with an external partner. After evaluating a number of providers, this pharmaceutical company selected Lavante based on the power of its underlying technology and the portal it offers to access it. Lavante also offered a breadth of coverage to reach the majority of the pharmaceutical company’s vendors rather than just the top 10-20% of its vendors.
The company implemented the change process by centralizing data quality through one common channel in order to ensure accurate books. To achieve this, the solution was integrated with the pharmaceutical company’s vendor outreach and registration process through four key components: validation, updates, augmentation and de-duplication to primarily find duplicate payments.
To read more about this process, download the full case study by clicking here.
It clearly demonstrates how this global pharmaceutical company was able to recover $5MM in credit opportunities based on a total spend of $10 billion. In order to have the same EPS impact, the organization estimated they would have needed to generate between $50MM and $100MM in new sales.
An underlying platform for credit recovery proved to be the key success factor. Previous, largely manual consultant-led activities focused on only top vendors and their “statement reviews” and led to a lower recovery rate. In contrast, the Lavante platform cast a wider net, and this broader reach resulted in additional recovery opportunities that had been previously overlooked. This was critical for this pharmaceutical company as the top 10-20% of vendors were already “over-farmed” and the next tier down was where the most significant potential for recovery was found.
