The group
Industry: Pharma
Headquarters: Switzerland
Employees group: over 5,000 employees
Founding year: 1950
The Italian office
Turnover: 65 million € (2019)
Employees: 85
Headquarters: Via Carlo Imbonati, 18 20159 Milan
Ferring is a pharmaceutical company engaged in research and development for the identification, creation and commercialization of innovative products forinfertility, l’urology and gastroenterology.
Ferring activities and products have the common goal to provide physicians with the effective drugs for the treatment of patients with major diseases.
Ferring, with its headquarters in Saint-Prex, Switzerland, operates in 60 countries employing more than 5,000 people for the purpose of ensuring the availability of its medicines in 110 countries.
This expansion has enabled Ferring to maintain a significant annual growth rate over the past two decades. Ferring has production facilities in several European countries and in South America, Israel and China. The company is also building new facilities in the United States and India.
The challenges
Ferring needed to increase control over investment costs, especially commercial, and to increase the preciseness of quarterly forecasts. To overcome these challenges, the commercial organization adopted a project-based approach to investment control: “Management by Project.”
Other challenges were:
- Develop a solution to integrate data from from different sources
- Tracking the investment projects for multiple dimensions (nature, time, product, and cost center) so as to assess the deviation of each individual project from the budget. Also through project tracking, optimize time spent on business analysis, rather than spending time integrating and reorganizing data for analysis
- Plan and control personnel costs
- Automate the process for budget preparation
The solution
The dimensions for timely investment control considered in developing the solution are:
– the Business Units (BUs): in turn divided by cost centers, the basis of the business organization
– products: basic element on which business investment is allocated
– i projects
The project was implemented in 4 phases:
- Integration of ERP data with those processed in the model, to check actual cost data against actual costs, purchase order book data with forecast costs
- Cost control and the P&L, analysis to check results by product and by projects according to the relevant BU
- Development of Human Resources model, to plan personnel costs for each individual resource
- Process automation development for annual budget preparation to eliminate manual compilation time done by the user
The benefits obtained
- Complete integration between the applications
- The Controller can quickly have at its available i planned data for forecast consolidation
- It is now possible to manage and analyze different What-If and Forecast scenarios
- Accuracy of the Forecast increased
- I problems on deviations emerge more quickly
- A complete integration between the departmental modules (sales, cost per project, personnel) with the result of the P&L
- The development of the HR budget and especially the management of infra annual forecasts ensured speed and data quality
- Reliable structure for data quality
- Recovery of man time and quality in control activities
- Speed of implementation e adherence to the project budget by the supplier
“In my experience, the fastest way to increase cost control, forecast accuracy and speed of information generation in the company lies in the ability to speak the same language by different business functions that are both the source and the users. Prevero’s suite, has played a key role in enabling the creation of a streamlined and flexible infrastructure from a” Management by Project “perspective, in which the needs of operations (Marketing, Sales, Medical department) as well as Finance coexist. This is to the benefit of the quality of corporate reporting to the parent company as well.”
Massimo Dammacco, Senior Financial Analyst – Ferring Spa
