Following a review of operational efficiency within sales and finance, the senior management team at BD identified the need to improve fundamental business processes.

This was planned in three key areas with the following goals:

• Develop and implement an inter-company Invoice Management System
• Achieve operational efficiency in Pan-EMEA Account Reconciliation
• Streamline Consignment Management to improve customer experience and stakeholder operations

BD operates in various regions across EMEA with a daily requirement to raise inter-company invoices at multiple sources.

With the absence of a centralised invoice management system, invoices were being raised, monitored and managed at regional level resulting in a lack of understanding at board level for intercompany charging.

Velocity IT responded to the need and developed an inter-company system to suit the scale and operation of BD’s Pan-EMEA operation and enable the effective process of inter-company invoicing between entities.

Velocity IT's solution was a seamless, process-driven application that now allows BD companies to raise inter-company invoices quickly, securely and in a way that can easily be tracked and processed.

Pan-EMEA accounts reconciliations and associated SOX compliancy reports were extremely time-consuming to complete every month.

The nature of the manual processes meant that multiple individuals were responsible for completing tasks that utilised a mixture of emails, spreadsheets and manual processes. An over-arching, challenging sign-off protocol which included various financial stakeholders added an additional layer of complexity to late arriving transactions that needed to be retrospectively approved during the month-end period. The key driver for this development derived from the need to improve the process in order to meet strict US F.D.A Compliancy ruling for accounting submissions – which carry a heavy financial penalty for non-compliance in relation to delivery time-frames.

Velocity IT created a system that allowed accounts data and transactions to be sourced from external sources and, as per a pre-defined accounts approval hierarchy, assigned to the various stakeholders and approvers for processing.

Due to the successful implementation of the new account reconciliation process, it has been standardised throughout BD's EMEA, allowing all teams to work against the same set of SLAs. This new process aids business-wide continuity and presents the business with a clear understanding of regional productivity to enable future support and development requirements.

A review of overall consignment management system within BD identified the following areas of inefficiency, exacerbated by a highly manual and adhoc process.

This was resulting in a loss of orders, mounting cost of sales and frustrations in the sales workforce:

• The lifecycle of the placement and usage of medical equipment on consignment at hospitals wasn’t managed in real-time, meaning that replenishments were not identified in-time and stock-outs were occurring.
• During the point of sale, the existing profitability formula was subjective and resulted in senior sales managers rejecting high volumes of orders.
• Order lead-times extended due to manual order backlogs.
• Heavy reliance on email engagement to track order consignments to determine order status at any given time.
• Regional variation in processes added further complication through lack of a standardised business wide system.

A project team lead by Velocity IT's business optimisation consultants and supported by business process specialists engaged with Bard’s project owners to devise and deliver a company-wide standardised system.