Global Pharmaceutical Company: State-of-the-Art Planning

Operating in a highly competitive environment and facing rising regulatory and cost pressures, this company recognized that having a highly efficient and standardized budgeting and forecasting process was more critical.

The organization charged with overseeing international sales and marketing activities was particularly keen on revising its budgeting and forecasting process. It knew that doing so would not only create operational efficiencies, but also improve the company’s ability to meet the pharmaceutical needs of its global customer base.

As a first step to improving its planning capabilities, the company introduced a set of Oracle Enterprise Performance Management applications, which, together, formed a single global financial planning solution. It was intended to:

• Standardize and integrate the complex, often conflicting, requirements of the company’s various marketing organizations.
  
  
• Provide local organizations a planning and forecasting tool that is able to simulate data according to different assumptions and methods, thus introducing what-if analyses to improve the quality and reliability of planning and forecasting figures.
  
  
• Shorten the budgeting and forecasting cycle, thereby allowing marketing professionals to spend more time on strategic activities and serving customers.
  
  
• Provide each country’s marketing organization (and headquarters) access to consistent types of information. This information, in turn, could be used to not only develop accurate and timely forecasts, but also to make better, faster decisions about marketing products that improve people’s lives.
  
  

Accenture worked closely with the client’s marketing organization to design and develop a cutting-edge budgeting and forecasting tool aimed at facilitating its international budget and forecast submission processes. This effort included:

• Assessing the various marketing organizations’ existing planning processes and identifying leading practices to be retained.
  
  
• Integrating these practices with the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management, applications using Hyperion Application Link.
  
  
• Developing a reporting capability that leveraged Hyperion Financial Reporting Services and Hyperion Web Analysis.
  
  
• Aligning gross-margin and fixed-cost processes among all of the client’s marketing organizations.

Accenture supported this objective by helping establish a robust, standardized planning capability that lets the company anticipate business requirements, make better decisions and allocate resources more effectively to its operations around the world. The solution:

• Simplified and standardized planning processes for its international sales and marketing activities, thereby enabling the company to deliver more consistent, more satisfying experiences to its customers around the world.
  
  
• Provided a single source for all planning figures, which improved planning accuracy and enabled consistent, integrated market reporting.
  
  
• Improved financial transparency, visibility and traceability.
  
  
• Aligned the company’s marketing and planning processes to strategic goals.
  
  
• Reduced the planning cycle time and enabled the company to use limited resources more effectively to deliver medications that improve lives.
  
  
• Increased reliability of the planning process and boosted confidence in planning figures.
  
  
• Allowed brand managers and other stakeholders to be more involved in the planning cycle.
  
  
• Improved accountability by linking planning figures to the originating drivers and assumptions.