Servier centralizes purchasing and improves catalog management

Goals

• Centralize purchases
• Ensure better catalog management
• Respond to internal customer requests with speed and agility

The Challenge

Servier Laboratories has a wide breadth of responsibilities, ranging from research to the sales of its medicines. The company manages a large amount of purchasing categories (services, supplier hosted catalog items, generic articles, etc.).

The Servier Group sought a solution to optimally manage its activities while addressing two main challenges:

• Servier needed a solution that would centralize its purchases and manage all catalogs within a single platform.
• They required a flexible solution that would scale to meet business needs and processes

The Solution

Servier decided that implementing the Procure-to-Pay solution on the Corcentric Platform as well as integrating Corcentric’s Gopher Intelligent Assistant was the best fit. The flexibility and robust offerings of these solutions stood out from the competition when it came to meeting Servier’s needs.

Main solution differentiators included:

• Capabilities to address all of the company’s purchasing families via catalog management.
• The ease of configuration, particularly when compared to ERPs.
• Corcentric Platform’s powerful engine that is backed by agility and reactivity.
• Implementation of the innovative Intelligent Assistant to support increased collaboration across teamss

As Servier evolves and expands its needs, this solution can be configured to easily manage changes across the organzation.

Additionally, the Intelligent Assistant greatly enhances the way teams communicate and access information needed for digital purchasing decisions.

“It is an agile application that allows us to adapt to the constant changes in business and our professions,” said Sylvain Feraud, Onboard to Pay Director, Laboratoires Servier. “Unlike a chatbot, it (Intelligent Assistant) is a two-way assistant that sends notifications in Teams to remind us of our tasks to do. As the Assistant improves, we discover new use cases. This is what will differentiate a classic chatbot from a real smart tool and will add value to our teams.”

Implementation Results

By customizing the application, Laboratoires Servier was able to create 119 catalogs, which now contain nearly 5 million items, and deploy to 1,600 users. The Corcentric Platform manages 4,000 rules and allows the company to quickly address small variations to any aspect of their processes.

“Maintaining these rules in everyday life is not complicated, it takes very little time to adapt the rules and it gives us the agility to respond to customers quickly,” says Feraud. “Researchers can go shopping from morning to evening easily.”

With the aim of simplifying the way teams and requestors work, the inclusion of Corcentric’s Intelligent Assistant allows them to focus more on their core business. Deployed and successfully adopted for over a year, this AI-powered solution is already demonstrating tangible business benefits:

• Requests for approval, receiving an order, or similar actions are easily completed without the need of logging into the interface (via Teams)
• Users are proactively notified of pending actions that minimize wait time and delays in processing
• Information can be quickly accessed by typing or speaking keywords, rather than maneuvering through previously cumbersome systems
• Purchasing administrators are relieved of mundane tasks and allowed to focus on more value added requests

The responsiveness and flexibility provided by the Corcentric Platform enabled the Servier Group to improve its performance. Servier has plans to add new purchasing-related processes, such as Sourcing and Supplier Management solutions from Corcentric.

“The integrated application has given us the visibility we were looking for,” says Feraud. “This obviously makes us want to expand the solution’s usage to other purchasing processes.”