Horizon: The benefits after prioritizing spend analytics, even for their new procurement organization
Watch the on-demand webinar
A leader in rheumatology and rare disease bio-pharma, Horizon Therapeutics invested in the latest in category management best practices and spend analysis technology to help them transform, visualize, and take action on new savings opportunities.
Horizon Therapeutics’ senior director of procurement joined us for a webinar, and below are some transcript highlights from the presentation. He described their approach to procurement transformation, started when the company was 11 years old but experiencing extremely rapid growth as they introduced new medications for rare diseases. Horizon was challenged with a lack of spend visibility and needed a way to quickly understand its spend profile to identify savings opportunities.
The procurement function was very new, less than 2 years old, what he called “a clean slate.” Despite the youth of the company and procurement org, there was still inherent complexity around spend analysis. Procurement focuses on indirect categories where spend is “extremely large” (such as marketing, IT, business data and services, R&D) and requires them to partner with departmental stakeholders.
“If I have information first on their spend, I can sit down with them and talk specifically about certain subcategories, certain suppliers, the different brands that we have where we might work with the same suppliers, and bring that into a collaborative environment.”
Watch the on-demand Webinar
On-demand: “Horizon’s Procurement Transformation: Utilizing Spend Analysis in Bio-Pharma” is available for you to view in full.
Here are some key excerpts from the webinar discussion regarding Horizon’s selection of SpendHQ for spend intelligence and the early benefits they realized:
Data-Driven and Insight-Empowered
“I did make a conscious decision when I came in here in talking with the CFO and other execs, I felt strongly in being able to take all of our information out of our ERP, which is SAP, and put it into SpendHQ and then quickly work through that and have discussions with stakeholders was very helpful – at the start and for the ongoing journey here.”
“How is the data organized from a procurement perspective?” It’s usually set up from an accounting perspective around GL codes, which doesn’t give you the ability to easily categorize that spend for procurement’s analysis. This was addressed with SpendHQ’s solution.
Stakeholder Collaboration and Proactive Planning
With SpendHQ, “having some of that information on spend at the right time, in the right format, enhances that discussion and builds on that collaboration that I want to stress with my team. And now we get to being trusted, we’re looking at common sets of data… and we can have that partnership.” He says this helps with an “ongoing evolution of collaboration and partnership with different stakeholders.”
Prioritizing Spend Analytics as Solution Investment
He says if the focus is only on P2P, you are paying vendors that you sign up but you’re not asking strategic questions about how you want to manage sourcing, negotiations, and vendors. You want procurement to be more integrated with the overall organization.
He made the business case internally to show to the CFO the expected value from a spend intelligence solution. They also worked with their own internal team to confirm that it could integrate well with their SAP system, and also discussing the implementation plan with the SpendHQ team.
“Now we can start to ask questions though in front of next year’s spend, next quarter’s spend, in front of the big contracts we might be signing up with vendors, so that we can manage that cost a lot better.”
Ease of Use Across the Procurement Team
SpendHQ’s product is “very intuitive… I can have my team, even folks that I’ve hired out of college who can grab the data, work with it, and use all the way up to the senior managers here.”