News & Research: Client Successes

Case Study: P2P Performance Improvement

ScottMadden helped a Fortune 100 pharmaceutical company evaluate its "Procure-to-Pay" (P2P) process and develop business process improvement recommendations.

• Management wanted to take an integrated look at its entire P2P process chain and identify business process improvement opportunities
• The project included teams from the purchasing department and the accounts payable department
• The company maintained a highly decentralized purchasing model and spend compliance was weak
• Management was concerned that process efficiency was not world class, and staffing levels kept increasing just to meet daily workload
• Moreover, each division maintained that the cause of these recurring problems stemmed from the "other" division. Cooperation was needed to find a solution

• Documented the company's current practices and performance metrics and compared these to leading practices and metrics
• Identified company's current state as compared to others on a P2P maturity model
• Identified performance and practice gaps, and developed business process improvement recommendations to address them
• Analyzed the "root cause" of recurring performance issues
• Developed recommendation to improve spend compliance and control unauthorized/unnecessary spending
• Developed a "P2P performance scorecard" to track Tier 1 and 2 performance metrics

• Established successful policies that mandated compliance with corporate purchasing standards
• Created a preferred practice matrix, which listed how each spend category should be acquired
• Improved tracking and reporting of purchasing compliance
• Improved mutual awareness and cooperation between the Global Sourcing and Finance Divisions with respect to their roles in the P2P process