Case Study

Global pharmaceutical company automates invoicing across all markets

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Industry

Healthcare

Function

Accounting & Finance

Topic

Document Processing, Procure-to-pay

Results

Speed

Cut invoice cycle time from weeks to minutes

Scale

Reached touchless invoicing across all markets

Scale

Enabled global straight-through processing

Company Profile

The firm is a global, UK-headquartered, science-led biopharmaceutical company with tens of thousands of employees serving patients in more than 100 countries. Its portfolio spans oncology, rare disease, and major cardiovascular and respiratory therapy areas, with R&D and manufacturing operations across multiple regions in a heavily regulated commercial environment.

Challenge

No unified invoice capture across 100+ markets

Accounts payable teams keyed vendor invoices by hand across more than 100 markets. The firm moved billions of dollars in annual procurement spend through a process that lacked a unified intelligent capture solution, and the goal of touchless processing stayed out of reach.

The fragmentation cost time at every step. Invoices waited days to be coded, exceptions cascaded into downstream payment delays, and straight-through processing was impossible at the scale a global pharmaceutical business runs at. Audit trails depended on reconstructing manual handoffs after the fact rather than reviewing structured data captured natively in the AP flow.

Solution

Global invoice intake integrated with SAP and procurement

The firm deployed an enterprise-wide invoice receipt and registration capability and integrated it directly with its global procurement platform and SAP back office. Vendor invoices arriving from any market and in any format are captured at point of receipt, classified by document type, and validated against purchase orders and master data before flowing into the procure-to-pay process and posting to the general ledger.

Clean purchase-order invoices now post straight through to payment without manual review; exceptions route to a human only when validation surfaces a discrepancy. The capture-and-coding step that used to take days now completes in a fraction of the time, and the firm runs a single global standard rather than a different intake process in every market.

The receipt-to-registration foundation sets the stage for the next layer: rules and policy processing for non-purchase-order coding, GL assignment, fraud detection, and other downstream exception handling, extending touchless beyond clean PO invoices into the broader AP process.