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customer story

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Austrian Company Richter Pharma Extends Business

Infrastructure with prevero

Richter Pharma has an impressive history: In the course of four centuries, the company has developed from a small pharmacy in the middle of the town square of Wels (Austria) to an international pharmaceutical business. Despite its size, product diversity and multitude of different sales channels, Richter Pharma still manages to remain close to its customers. More precisely: close to both humans and animals. The company's

Customer

Company:

Richter Pharma AG

Sector:

Pharmaceutical sector

Size:

Sales of EUR 549 million,

423 employees

Products by prevero:

Business planning"Quality and efficiency are

visibly increasing"

guiding principle "Healthy People – Healthy Animals" pervades all aspects of the business. The most important prerequisite for this endeavor is a smoothly running business infrastructure. Apart from managing the "Human" and "Veterinary" divisions in the best possible way, this includes the development, sales and distribution of products and pharmaceuticals for various different sectors. Richter Pharma supplies pharmacies, doctor's practices as well as care facilities. In order to ensure a continuous supply that remains economically feasible, it is necessary to plan and budget a large number of products for various sectors over different periods of time. Recently, this has become more and more of a challenge, which was reason enough for Richter Pharma to change the situation. For this purpose, they decided to find a professional tool capable of increasing transparency and providing reliable support at all times.

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"Quality and efficiency are visibly increasing"

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a unanimous decision for prevero, a Unit4 company and leading provider of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. The reason: The prevero system looked like the most flexible solution, especially considering the complexity of Richter Pharma's own application. Moreover, the software was user-friendly, intuitive and inspiring. Last but not least, the individual data modeling capabilities were another decisive factor.

Improved personnel planning structures

Budgets are created for the entire group, which also includes Pharma Logistik Austria GmbH, the in-house logistics company responsible for the distribution of pharmaceuticals. Richter Pharma itself is divided into several different business segments. Sales and cost center planning have already been implemented with the new tool as well as sales planning at customer and material level. Moreover, there have been significant improvements in personnel planning, which is now carried out at employee level, includes different cost types and highlights clearly, which personnel costs can be allocated to which cost centers and productions – also for the sales division.

Mr. Losekamm: "We are extremely satisfied with the developments. Sales planning is now carried out once a year across all divisions. What's particularly noteworthy about this process is that all planning data is synchronized directly with the forecast. The reality check – which means the target/actual comparison – is carried out monthly. Production planning is already in development. Currently, it has not been integrated into the overall process yet, but it will be in the upcoming months."

Reliable, compatible and effortless

Werner Losekamm, Head of Controlling at Richter Pharma AG: "Our entire planning – including sales, personnel and cost center planning – was completely

based on Excel. Production planning was linked to sales planning and it was based on an extremely complex derivation logic comprising different sales volumes, sales figures, costs and many other factors. The data we used for cal-culations and to report our actual figures came from SAP as well as another source system. To keep our processes stable, our future software partner had to ensure three things: Firstly, they had to guarantee that our current planning infrastructure could be reproduced 100 % in order to ensure an error-free transition after switching to the new system. Additionally, we needed them to provide interfaces to SQL server and SAP as well as full compatibility with various data sources such as Access. Last but not least, the new provider’s exact reproduction of our status quo had to provide an optimal platform for future changes. Our objective was to achieve a much easier planning process without losing any data.”

Intuitive and inspiring software

According to Mr. Losekamm, the company took its time during the selection process. They thoroughly checked their options on the market and decided on a shortlist of three vendors. After several meetings, presentations and workshops, there was

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"Quality and efficiency are visibly increasing"

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grow, which is a really good feeling." As a result, all tasks have become easier, faster and much more comprehensible. The software provides plausibility checks; all necessary changes can be carried out immediately – an enormous improvement compared to the tedious reconciliation of Excel sheets they had to deal with in the past.

Consistent planning cycles

Richter Pharma is completely satisfied with their choice. Mr. Losekamm: "Even though our new tool has not been implemented 100 % yet, the results are rather impressive. In some regards, they even exceed our expectations. One of the best things is that we can now work with one consistent system. As a result, we can carry out coherent planning cycles from A to Z. The consistency of our actual data provides an excellent basis for projections as well as the budget for the subsequent year. This includes significantly more complex personnel planning as well as all cost assessments we need for sales planning."

Before/after comparison

When taking a closer look at the different tasks within the company, the tremendous developments become even more apparent. In terms of budgeting, for example, Richter Pharma had to deal with an enormous amount of Excel sheets in the past, which entailed a large potential for errors and multiple data versions. All figures had to be processed manually, then a P&L statement was created and forwarded to the respective divisional heads and branch managers. "After some time, all sheets came back to me, I merged them and created a first draft of the budget." According to Mr. Losekamm, this process was rather time-consuming and not at all satisfactory.

"We can see our structures grow"

Today, the employees can enter all information and current data for their departments into one central system completely by themselves. Mr. Losekamm has a clear overview of all changes and is therefore always up to date: "We can see our structures

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"Quality and efficiency are visibly increasing"

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Small feature, massive impact

There is one feature that may look small at first sight, but has a massive impact on every day business: "If there is a content-related issue during planning, I can go backwards in the system, trace the origins of all data and planning values and identify potential error sources quickly and directly. Subsequently, I can make all required changes myself, which makes things a lot easier. Even better: All of this can be carried out with only a few clicks. Planning changes can also be completed in a matter of seconds."

Saving one man-month per year

How is the new tool received by the employees? According to Mr. Losekamm, user acceptance is rather high and the feedback is great: People find the software self-explanatory, clear and inspiring. The employees are integrated into the business processes more closely and assume more responsibility due to the decentralized planning and budgeting approach.

Mr. Losekamm: "All in all, we were able to save a significant amount of time thanks to the consistency of the system as well as the new data quality. In the past, our planning process took us from September to December. Now, we don't have to start planning until October, which means we are saving one man-month per year. In fact, we are saving actual money as those resources can be used for our customers or to perform more analytic tasks to further increase the quality of our work."

Reliable business infrastructure

What are the future plans with prevero? Mr. Lose-kamm immediately responds: "We are looking forward to our production planning going live soon. Additionally, we would like to extend sales planning, budgeting and actuals reporting by including risk management and integrated financial planning. This will open up completely new opportunities for us. In the end, our entire business infrastructure will be based on a flexible and reliable system that we can always count on. This, by the way, also applies to the team behind the system."

About usprevero, a Unit4 company, provides Business Intelligence (BI) and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions for the areas of analysis, reporting, controlling and business planning. With its portfolio, prevero supports the sustainable improvement of decision and management processes in companies of all sizes and from all industry sectors.

www.prevero.com, info@prevero.com

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