PCI Pharma Services – Supply Chain

Overview

PCI Pharma Services is a global, integrated Contract Development & Manufacturing Organisation (CDMO) delivering a comprehensive range of pharmaceutical services from the earliest stages of development through to commercial launch and beyond.

Situation

Sales teams across the business regularly reach out to their Procurement colleagues to obtain supplier pricing for materials and services for client projects. PCI’s Procurement team wanted to find a way to streamline this both from their own, and from the Sales teams’ viewpoint, as well as providing greater transparency for managers at site, division and ultimately business level. They also wanted to be able to ensure that questions raised by suppliers and the various responses were shared with all suppliers invited to quote.

Solution

Mint’s solution was to customise an element of PCI’s Salesforce Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system – initially for the Clinical Division – enabling a request (for certain items) originating within Sales to feed through to Procurement, on to suppliers, back to Procurement and then back to Sales, all within one central location. It also added the benefit of time-tracking to log how long suppliers took to respond, the processing time taken by the Procurement team and an overall timeframe for the selection of a preferred supplier.

The work involved the introduction of new custom user interfaces, enabling Sales team members to enter their requirements, while the system automatically pulls information from the opportunity record through to the request, flagging up any discrepancies. Upon notification of the new request, the Procurement team can then review and select up to three from a predefined list of potential suppliers (appropriate to the product and site involved) to invite quotes.

As well as collaborating with internal teams, Mint also liaised with key suppliers who were then given logins and training to access an ‘Experience Cloud Site’ – a special area of Mint expertise – where they can see a list of all their invitations to quote from PCI and each one’s current status. (An automatic email with a high-level summary of the quote required is an initial alert that they need to log on to see a new quote request). Suppliers can also use a messaging facility within the site to communicate with Procurement about any queries before uploading their full quotation, including any appropriate attachments to support their bid.

Once the quotations are submitted by suppliers, the Procurement team can use their custom user interface to compare them and make their selection. Notifications of the outcome are then automatically sent to the original requestor in Sales, including the sell price they should apply in their quotation to the customer. Suppliers are also notified automatically, with those who have been unsuccessful receiving information on why this is the case.

Results

Procurement teams now have a better understanding of how long suppliers take to respond and can compare quotes more easily, helping them to make the correct decision for PCI at any given time.

The benefit for the Sales team is that members are able to see more detail, including the original quote provided by the supplier, as well as the current status of any open requests.

PCI’s Director for Procurement for both Clinical and D&M (Development & Manufacturing) Divisions is Kaye Voigtlander who said: ‘We have been able to save significant time in generating each proposal.

‘Even more importantly, the new system means we can pull out reports and analyse all sorts of aspects of the procurement process and offers from suppliers.’

She added that the new system is also helpful to the suppliers themselves, not only for the automatic and timely notifications on the success of their quote, but because it also alerts them on whether PCI goes on to win the relevant project so they learn their services or products will be required as promptly as possible.

The system has already had a second phase, rolled out to the Commercial Division which required slightly different views to be built into the system, and there are also plans to make it available for D&M.

Longer term, the team at Mint are also going to explore how the new Supply Chain facility can link to the PAQT Proposal and Quoting Solution they have helped PCI to develop within Salesforce.

“We have been able to save significant time in generating each proposal.”

Kaye Voigtlander
Director of Procurement, Clinical