The operations team related to clinical supply chain managing procurement, packaging, labelling, transportation, and storage of clinical trial materials across multiple countries was facing challenges. They were having difficulties in manually monitoring and reconciling budgets versus actual expenses across multiple vendors. The absence of a standardized and automated financial workflows made it difficult to track spend accurately and forecast future costs with confidence.

Key business challenges

An internal assessment revealed multiple pain points affecting financial visibility and efficiency:

• Disparate vendor formats: Vendors submitted invoices in varied formats and languages, requiring manual consolidation and validation for reporting.
• Lack of standardization: There was no uniform method to capture and categorize purchase order data for cost types such as transportation, brokerage, and customs fees.
• Regional complexity: Vendor reports from different countries required manual translation and conversion of currencies.
• Manual effort: Finance teams relied heavily on Excel-based reporting, spending considerable time compiling and validating vendor data with invoice processing systems and other systems instead of focusing on analysis and strategic planning.

These challenges led to delayed financial reporting, inconsistent data, and limited visibility into true budget utilization. As the organization expanded its vendor network globally, the complexity of spend monitoring and vendor management increased substantially.

The client sought to streamline its vendor budget optimization and projecting process through automation, with the objective of:

• Reducing manual workload involved in processing vendor invoices and purchase orders.
• Standardizing vendor data submission to improve data consistency.
• Enhancing visibility into budget versus actual expenditure at category and program levels.
• Enabling proactive spend forecasting to support data-driven financial planning.