Company: Biopharmaceutical
Industry: Medical / Life Sciences
Client Background
Our client is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing innovative therapies for refractory neurological diseases. Built by experts in neuroscience, neurosurgery, and drug delivery, the company specializes in intracerebroventricular (ICV) therapies and is working to bring novel drug therapies and companion biomarker strategies to patients.
As a venture-backed life sciences startup, the company was scaling its operations and increasingly relying on third-party vendors and specialized service providers. With purchasing activity growing, the existing manual procurement and expense-tracking processes were becoming difficult to sustain, creating a need for better automation, financial visibility, and control.
Client Challenges
- Manual Purchase Order Management: Purchase orders were created using Microsoft Word and Excel, making the process cumbersome, time-consuming, and increasingly prone to errors.
- Fragmented Spending Information: Procurement and expense data was maintained across spreadsheets and shared drives, making it difficult to obtain a consolidated view of vendor spending.
- Limited Vendor-Level Analysis: Management lacked an efficient way to analyze vendor-by-vendor expenditure over time, limiting its ability to identify spending trends and negotiate more effectively.
- Reconciliation and Payment Risks: Manual reconciliation created the possibility of duplicate or delayed payments, while requiring additional effort from the accounting team.
- Limited Forecasting Visibility: Without structured spending data, the company found it difficult to accurately forecast future expenses, plan budgets, and manage cash flow.
Our Solutions
- Automated Procurement Workflow: OBS implemented a procurement solution to replace the company’s fragmented Word- and Excel-based processes with a centralized workflow for purchase orders, approvals, order tracking, and reconciliation.
- Automated PO Generation & Tracking: The solution streamlined purchase order creation and tracking, reducing repetitive administrative work and providing greater visibility into purchasing activity.
- Vendor-Level Spend Analytics: OBS enabled vendor-by-vendor spend analysis over time, giving management access to structured data that could be used for budgeting, forecasting, vendor negotiations, and future procurement planning.
- Automated Reconciliation: The new workflow streamlined invoice reconciliation and reduced the risk of duplicate and late payments, improving the reliability of the company’s purchasing and accounting processes.
- Xero Integration: Approved invoices were synchronized directly with Xero, eliminating repetitive manual data entry and creating a more efficient connection between procurement and accounting.
Results Achieved
Within six months, OBS helped the biopharmaceutical company replace manual procurement processes with a more automated and scalable workflow. Key results included:
- 65% reduction in purchase order processing time through automated PO creation and tracking.
- 55% reduction in procurement-related administrative effort, eliminating the need for additional administrative headcount.
- 70% improvement in invoice reconciliation efficiency, reducing manual accounting workload.
- 90% reduction in the risk of duplicate and late payments through structured reconciliation.
- 20+ hours of manual accounting work saved each month through automated Xero invoice synchronization.
- 15% estimated procurement cost savings through improved spend visibility and vendor analysis.
- 40% improvement in budgeting and cash flow planning efficiency through structured spending data.
Business Impact
As a result, the company gained greater control over procurement spending, improved financial visibility, and reduced administrative dependency. Vendor-level spend analysis also enabled more informed budgeting, forecasting, vendor negotiations, and cash flow planning, while the automated workflow provided a scalable foundation for supporting the company’s continued growth.