{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.text}}
{{item.videoDuration}}
{{item.title}}
{{item.text}}
In the life sciences sector, CFOs and controllers play a critical role delivering timely and compliant financial data to all stakeholders. Today’s life sciences finance executives are expected to have full visibility to their company's financial performance, and the ever-changing market dynamics and regulatory landscape challenging that performance. They need to make data-driven decisions with precision and insight to help guide their companies toward improving growth and profitability.
To be strategic partners in their companies, today’s life sciences finance executives should constantly gauge the financial implications of:
- R&D’s latest product launch timing
- The growing complexity of supply chains and legal entity structures
- Mergers and acquisitions
- Patent expiry strategies
- Increasing regulatory demands, such as Pillar 2 tax rules
CFOs and controllers in the pharmaceutical, medical device and biotech industries share similar concerns with current systems and data. They want to focus on value-added profitability analysis to improve their company's overall performance, rather than spending time on data collection. They want to reduce the time required to reconcile information from multiple sources and reduce the time required to close the books.
As life sciences companies look ahead to implementing SAP S/4HANA, there are several new features and functionality that S/4HANA and other SAP applications provide that can help CFOs and Controllers address current challenges and provide a platform for future finance transformation.
Opportunities for the finance function with SAP S/4HANA
There are numerous advantages that SAP S/4HANA and applications such as SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) can provide the life sciences finance function. Many of the new functional capabilities are already designed and documented in the Industry Edge for Life Sciences solution (see below for more details) developed by PwC. However, here are the most important advantages of SAP S/4HANA for the life sciences finance function:
Simplifying financial processes and centralizing project accounting: greater functionality and automation, reducing complexity and increasing efficiency. This includes enhancing the investment in R&D and other large capital projects throughout the entire project lifecycle.
Accelerating financial close: reductions in the number of days it takes to close the books, making financial reporting faster and more efficient.
Integrated data model: code blocks as a foundation for the enterprise integrated data model, as well as improved transfer pricing and product traceability.
Enhancing forecast precision: better planning, analysis and decision making on SAP Analytics Cloud (e.g., FP&A on SAC).
Improve working capital: improve positions for Accounts Receivable, Inventory and Accounts Payable.
Obtaining real-time visibility, transparency and insights into intercompany transactions: the Intercompany Reconciliation Tool provides early analysis in the closing process to avoid differences and to reduce the deadline pressure that normally arises during the end of a closing period. In addition, enable real-time insights with SAP Datasphere and PwC’s Leading with Insights’ dashboards and reporting.
Enhanced cashflow management: SAP S/4HANA for real-time, accurate and business-wide view of cash and cash flows critical for managing liquidity effectively.
Why start from scratch if you don’t need to?
Industry Edge for Life Sciences is our SAP S/4HANA instance that has been tailored with life sciences specific functionality. This instance allows PwC to more easily demonstrate to clients the features, functionality and advantages of SAP S/4HANA for a wide range of functions. Our Industry Edge is a unique combination of SAP, industry leading business practices and cloud technology insights designed to engineer a data, process and insights thread across your clinical, operations, finance and commercial functions. Our Industry Edge for Life Sciences includes:
- Standard taxonomy aligned to SAP S/4HANA
- Business process flows and descriptions — down to a Level 3 business process decomposition — built on SAP Signavio
- Predefined data model for life sciences to enable visualization of transactional business processes
- Foundational and core processes which can be adopted without change to speed implementation
- A “plug-and-play”/day one demo approach with context-sensitive deliverables to readily enable visualization of future functionality
- Test scripts covering business scenarios critical for life sciences companies
Let’s get started, together!
Whether your company is considering a technical migration to SAP S/4HANA, or you’re a finance executive looking to increase your organization’s capabilities, now is the time to investigate and fully understand your future opportunities. PwC is prepared to help you define your future finance goals, align those goals to your company’s SAP S/4HANA program and deliver bottom-line benefits to your company.
{{filterContent.facetedTitle}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
{{contentList.loadingText}}
Follow us
