When a leading biotech company wanted to improve its financial reportingWe helped them see their business at a granular level |
Life Sciences Case Study
Financial Analytics: Financial Performance Management
The challenge
Timely, integrated, and accurate financial reporting is crucial for enabling global operations. That fact became acutely evident for a leading biotechnology organization when it realized its financial systems weren’t keeping pace with rapid growth. The US$4.5 billion life sciences company knew it was time to invest in the reporting and analytics applications and processes that would allow it to leverage its global strategies.
The client needed a globally consistent and integrated platform for reporting and analytics. It had also been hampered by a lack of a defined support organization, standardized processes, and automation – making every planning and consolidation cycle difficult and prone to error.
How we helped
The company had previously tried to use a Deloitte competitor to achieve its objectives, but the project failed. Based on its demonstrated experience, Deloitte was brought in to implement an Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) system and an e-business suite, including process and organizational improvements. The client chose Deloitte because we offered the full spectrum of capabilities to support its transformation, including EPM, process redesign, organizational redesign, security, and governance.
With a project team of 15 to 20 Deloitte specialists, we delivered a full EPM suite, with globally consistent, scalable, efficient, and appropriately granular applications. We helped develop a planning process to handle management allocations and foreign currency exposure analysis and deploy a data relationship management solution to centrally maintain and distribute metadata. What’s more, we assisted in integrating data among all relevant applications and standardized processes to support future acquisitions and business growth. Finally, we helped design a Center of Excellence organization responsible for the management, ownership, and governance of the applications.
Solution
Applying Deloitte’s insights, the client was able to replace spreadsheets for data submission with data extracts. They also improved the user experience for ease of use, reduced manual interventions, decreased reliance on Microsoft Excel, and enhanced analysis capabilities.
Today, the client has the tools and standardized processes it needs to leverage allocations management, analyze currency exposure, reduce redundant data sources, and eliminate multiple reconciliation activities. It’s also achieving greater insight into the budget/close cycle, and supporting acquisitions and growth in a highly competitive and rapidly changing industry.
