Case Study: Global Pharmaceutical Company Cuts AP Cost-Per-Invoice By Half

A global pharmaceutical company processes nearly two million invoices per year through a handful of shared service centers (SSCs), but was suffering with a 20-day backlog. The company was already using Ariba's eProcurement product so it decided to use that vendor's EIPP solution too. The project manager took time to get top-level commitment to the wide-ranging changes he knew he would need. The eProcurement foundation helped enrollment because the pharmaceutical company's suppliers were already used to receiving POs via the Ariba Supplier Network (ASN), so extending that to invoices was a logical progression. The company achieves 30,000 invoices per AP clerk per year, and the project manager estimates that costs per invoice have been cut by 50%.