AmerisourceBergen gains finance efficiencies with Oracle Cloud EPM
The leading global healthcare company relies on Oracle Cloud EPM to act on emerging healthcare trends.
“We chose Oracle when we recognized the need for a comprehensive suite. We wanted to have one platform with purpose-built capabilities in all the different areas of performance management related to the CFO, and we had confidence that we could deploy these in a way that made sense for AmerisourceBergen.”
Business challenges
AmerisourceBergen, ranked #10 on the Fortune 500, is a global healthcare solutions leader that works with global manufacturers, providers, and pharmacies to improve product access and efficiency throughout the healthcare supply chain.
Since its inception, AmerisourceBergen has grown significantly through acquisitions—resulting in a highly fragmented and complex financial systems landscape. On a typical day, AmerisourceBergen brings about 15 million data elements into its general ledger. In a quarter, this easily turns into over a billion data elements. With more than 10 ERP systems (primarily SAP), 25-odd Hyperion Planning and Essbase applications, and spreadsheets to support its EPM business processes, efficiency and standardization were big challenges. Furthermore, there was limited automation, especially for data integration, data, governance, and financial controls, which required time-consuming, heavy manual efforts. Its challenging technology environment made it even tougher for the company to respond quickly to disruptive events such as the pandemic—especially with accurate planning and forecasting to meet changing demands.
Because a large portion of the company’s business is in distribution and logistics, narrow profit margins required that AmerisourceBergen be particularly cost-conscious. Decision-making occurred at a granular level, in terms of products distributed and customers distributed to. The company sought sophisticated technology for analysis, planning, and forecasting that could scale in size and complexity.
Why AmerisourceBergen chose Oracle
After an extensive evaluation of multiple EPM vendors, including OneStream, AmerisourceBergen selected Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM for its unified platform with comprehensive EPM capabilities that integrate with SAP. The company considered Oracle to be the most suitable platform, with deep, purpose-built functionality.
AmerisourceBergen began a large-scale finance transformation to gain efficiency and agility. Company leaders had confidence that Oracle Cloud EPM was flexible enough to be deployed in a phased approach, given the size, global nature, and complexity of AmerisourceBergen’s business. After all, it is no small feat to handle roughly 20% of all the pharmaceuticals sold and distributed throughout the United States.
Another key reason for the decision to go with Oracle Cloud EPM was its behind-the-scenes data governance and master data management capabilities.
Results
Executed during the pandemic in 2020, Oracle Cloud EPM helped transform EPM processes. The consistent user interface and data integration across the EPM suite enabled users from different teams and business units to gain efficiencies and standardization, which positively impacted their business processes and profits. For example, planning processes were standardized across different global business units, reducing time-consuming data issues.
AmerisourceBergen now forecasts at the customer and product levels, and identifies emerging trends at a micro level before they become macro-level trends. Finance professionals also gained visibility into fluctuations by drilling from their actuals to the transaction level. AmerisourceBergen also used workforce planning to provide more connected planning processes between finance and human resources. It also used scenario planning to complete analyses quickly from a contingency planning standpoint.
The company boasts a fully automated financial consolidation process, from source systems to financial reporting. With automated controls and validation reporting done through robotic process automation, processing times shrunk from hours to minutes. AmerisourceBergen also automated controls and validation reporting, reducing risk and streamlining the controls process.
Moving forward, AmerisourceBergen sees Oracle Cloud EPM as supporting its active M&A strategy and smoothing the process of integrating acquired companies. The company made a number of very large acquisitions, including Alliance Healthcare most recently.
Partners
AmerisourceBergen chose Huron Consulting Group as its implementation partner for Oracle Cloud EPM.