In order to optimise the company’s treasury processes at an international level, Pfizer has established several regional shared service centres, known collectively as Global Financial Solutions (GFS). Recently the decision was taken to outsource some of the tasks managed by the company’s European shared service treasury operations to a business process outsourcing (BPO) partner.

“As Pfizer had been using Citi as our single European banking partner since 2002, we asked the bank to help with the migration of these tasks to the BPO company,” says Gavin O’Donoghue, Indirect Tax and Treasury Manager, GFS Europe. “The challenge for Citi was to speed up the migration by automating and digitising key workflows, and to provide the greater visibility and control required by Pfizer under the new outsourcing arrangement.”

The solution developed by Citi and Pfizer included three principal stages:

1. In order to streamline the account management process, Pfizer implemented Citi’s Electronic Bank Account Management (eBAM) solution. As a result, many of the existing manual account management practices were replaced with electronic alternatives. Bank accounts are now managed using a secure portal, which supports the use of third party authentication of digital signatures.

2. Inefficiencies were addressed within both the order-to-cash (O2C) and purchase-to-pay (P2P) cycles. In the O2C cycle, procedures were standardised and optimised across Pfizer’s ERP and treasury systems, resulting in the automatic matching of around 70% of cash receipts to purchase orders and invoices. On the P2P side, a three-way reconciliation process was developed between automatically uploaded statements of bank charges, Citi’s rate card and accounts payable and accounts receivable volumes reported by Pfizer’s Oracle ERP system.

3. Citi developed a web-based scorecard, which reports the status of queries raised by the BPO partner and facilitates efficient resolution. Data from the scorecard is fed into GFS’ management dashboard. The GFS dashboard was also enhanced to include predictive capabilities, which could be used to identify and resolve any performance problems.

“Data is key in the SSC environment; the tools that we have developed… allow us to take action to drive down the average cost of a transaction.”

Together, these solutions have enabled GFS to achieve increased visibility, control and process efficiency as well as cost reductions. In addition, the benefits of the solution are set to be extended beyond Pfizer’s specific needs to take on a wider significance. The performance dashboard in particular represents a benchmarking tool which can be applied to other companies in other industries.

“Data is key in the SSC environment; the tools that we have developed in collaboration with Citi bring us timely and accurate information regarding the efficiency of our banking processes and allow us to take action to drive down the average cost of a transaction. The tools also allow us to benchmark anonymously with our peers,” says O’Donoghue.