A Fortune 10 Pharmaceutical Distributor
Customer service is everything in a contract servicing business. One of the ways a large pharmaceutical distributor stays competitive is by providing innovative ways to reduce costs to customer while managing its own risk at the same time. The solution is Pre-pay deposits.
Salient Process designed, automated and implemented the customer deposit management process. By leveraging IBM BPM, and using the rapid development capability it brings, Salient Process was able to deliver a functional product on a tight budget.
The existing implementation of Pre-pay service was riddled with problems. The data received in the requests was inaccurate, the general ledger (GL} did not get updated properly, money had to move through multiple GL accounts before being correctly allocated, and people were left to interpret terminologies. Business development staff had to make sense of accounting jargon and legal language. Differences in customer size, and thus practices and demands, only added fuel to the fire.
Salient Process was again brought on to lead the efforts using its expertise in BPM. We followed our thoroughly documented and proven SPARK methodology.
The new system guided users to the desired results. Providing context for sensitive information and the ability to go back and forth to put the request together, users were able to provide necessary and accurate data from the beginning.
The architecture used involved creating integrations with SAP and services on the enterprise service bus (ESB). The system even helped identify discrepancies in customer accounts, that both parties suspected but could not pinpoint. The Master Data Management team was engaged to work under the hood but in the realm of business process.
Integrations with SAP allowed Billing Operations to eliminate many swivel chair tasks and avoid the overhead of manually pulling data by setting up and running multiple reports, often ad-hoc in nature.
The fault-tolerant system allowed the users to continue using the system even when the integrations would fail. Items would get queued up and support staff would be informed of the issues and errors automatically.
With 360-degree visibility, reconciling payments made by the customers wasn’t a guessing game anymore.
Apart from the event-based workflow, the system automatically generated an adjustment report per customer manager periodically. It also provided a way to generate the adjustment report on request. Accurate billing data will be calculated and made readily available to the customer managers.
Leveraging the power of digitization and using automation as appropriate, the mundane was out and the intelligent was in. Account managers and regional directors didn’t have to hide and always had the answers they needed to be in front of the customers. One could say that it is truly possible to free the humans so that they can do higher-level thinking!
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