AstraZeneca has a global policy of empowering local management teams. When the business found itself facing significant market pressure, it wanted to retain decentralisation but create consistent, transparent and accountable sales and marketing definitions and activities to integrate top-line growth and bottom-line costs.

Business Challenges

Whilst AstraZeneca did not want to lose the benefits of their decentralisation strategy, the business was facing three pressure-points that needed an integrated solution:

• Pressure on prices, especially in the established European markets, with governments seeking to control the ever-rising costs of healthcare
• Huge investments in five rapidly growing “mega-brand” products, driving sales and marketing investment whilst maintaining a large mature portfolio
• Tremendous growth and huge potential in some of the emerging markets such as China, Korea, Brazil, Russia, Mexico and Eastern Europe

Solutions

The objective was to achieve better cost and performance management through consistency, transparency and accountability.

• Consistency was achieved by giving each management team in the top 50 countries exactly the same management reporting pack to review sales, activities, costs and outcomes, using common definitions. Every country adopted the same ‘information model’ to capture data locally, using a common global chart of accounts and a common set of cost centres and activity definitions
• Transparency was delivered by a common underlying ERP model, which required changing 20 ERP systems around the world, including SAP, Oracle and Sun. A standardised reporting system was introduced, based upon a Business Objects reporting tool and an Oracle database. Important design principles were built-in to support transparent reporting. There was no allocation of costs; instead all costs were captured at source. Only ‘natural costs’, such as travel, PR and clinical studies, were held in the chart of accounts
• Accountability was achieved by working with each management team around the world to be clear about who was accountable for each item of cost and activity, with the aim of delegating accountability down the organisation as much as possible

Benefits

The Atos Origin solution delivered a wide range of benefits that brought immediate improvements and offers the potential for long-term efficiencies and business gains.

• Better and consistent information
• Benchmarking
• Budgeting and planning
• Exploiting the foundation
• Time and efficiency
• Return on investment (ROI)
• Common SAP blueprint

Download the AstraZeneca Enigma Case Study