Art of the possible

It takes a complex information technology infrastructure and deep service provider relationships to support this major pharmaceutical company. With its long-term finance and digital transformations underway, the company’s leaders started an effort to restructure its finance and accounting business process services as well as applications development and maintenance services agreements.

The goal was to update services, costs and processes as well as add intelligent automation capabilities to better meet future needs. And, based on our trusted relationship, methodologies, and domain experience, they brought the KPMG team in to help lead the discussions. They also sought our assistance in establishing a governance process and helping ensure they worked on opportunities with the best potential outcomes.

This company’s leaders practiced the principle that restructuring outsourcing agreements wasn’t only about lowering costs. They applied the same practice to intelligent automation. Each restructured agreement and process had a significant planned productivity gain.

With our help, this pharmaceutical company now has more beneficial long-term service provider agreements and knows where each provider fits in the company’s overall digital transformation journey. THe most significant results include:

• restructured applications services agreement that lowered maintenance costs by 45 percent and more effectively supported the company’s information technology strategy with process improvements, automation and self-help to streamline services and make them easier to use
• restructured information technology services agreement that resulted in competitive costs, market-leading service levels and use of digital technologies for a better user experience
• restructured finance and accounting agreement that lowered costs by 40 percent through productivity and intelligent automation
• mitigated risk with Digital Center of Excellence
• secured support for productivity, service quality improvement, IT security, financial controls, and compliance
• identified most beneficial processes to consider automating.

We built mutual trust with this client after working shoulder-to-shoulder for many years. When it came to transformative decisions such as adding intelligent automation capabilities and restructuring major agreements, they called us to:

• evaluate agreements with all of its information technology service and solution providers
• collaborate with the company’s leaders and its service providers to restructure many of its agreements to include automation and other technologies that would support the company’s transformation as well as help ensure the company received the best value from each agreement
• help identify most beneficial processes to consider for intelligent automation
• collaborate to provide tools and training to a passionate, empowered team to experiment with cognitive technologies in a calculated manner and improve the companies understanding of the technologies’ capabilities
• analyze the company’s transformation roadmap and adjust where needed.

Trust uncovers the impossible and the possible

This company’s leaders developed service provider relationships for the long-term and set expectations based on trust. Trust motivates providers to recommend aggressive approaches and helps give leaders the confidence to choose them. Trust encourages transparent discussions—what’s possible and what isn’t—and the client knows KPMG will deliver.

It’s all in the diplomacy

In addition to confirming service levels and competitive costs, we helped these leaders use foresight to build productivity savings from intelligent automation into its restructured contracts so it could realize many of the benefits its providers achieve. We also used a contract assessment process that’s repeatable across all service agreements, companywide.

Deep experience helps make the right turns and avoid the blind spots

Intelligent automation introduced new considerations such as who owns the infrastructure and intellectual property as well as risk mitigation. This company also never needed to oversee digital labor from the identity management, security and continuity planning perspectives. Our KPMG team members brought not only risk and control knowledge into conversations but also a deep understanding of the client’s needs and culture combined with experience working with intelligent automation in many companies.