EVERSANA: Leveraging Finance to Make Pharma Faster
EVERSANA struggled with a manual, spreadsheet-driven planning and reporting process as the company acquired 15 companies and grew from 500 to 2,000 people. Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, EVERSANA now easily keeps pace with the fast-moving world of life sciences while meeting the expectations for agile planning.
Working at the speed of science
The needs of the life sciences sector evolve by the minute. To help bring new life-changing medicines to market, pharmaceutical companies around the world rely on EVERSANA to help commercialize their innovative formulations. With their integrated commercial services platform, EVERSANA helps companies quickly solve any drug pricing, promotion, access, reimbursement, adherence, or product delivery challenge so medicines get into the hands of patients sooner.
To better serve clients across the patient lifecycle, EVERSANA acquired and combined several leading life science companies under one umbrella, quickly quadrupling its headcount while adding several ERPs for finance to manage. As a result, EVERSANA’s manual spreadsheet-based processes no longer had the speed or adaptability to keep up with the new needs of the business.
“We’ve acquired 15 companies since 2018 across the US and globally, and needed to start planning at a more granular level. Our people are our number one cost, and we needed more information to better know how to plan,” said Jeff Bono, Director of Finance at EVERSANA.
The company’s rapid growth also meant the company struggled with version control and data accuracy. “We needed a good system of record,” Bono said. “For example, we couldn’t easily load in financials prior to acquiring other companies, but for a trailing 12 month we always need to be able to report as if we had owned those companies before the actual close date. We needed a single source for financials for acquired companies to drive speed and accuracy.”
Bono eventually found himself trying to juggle information from more than 6,000 employees across more than 100 spreadsheets. Constant file crashes, broken formulas, and struggles verifying the origins of data points made the finance team realize it was time for a change.
“Implementing a solution like Workday Adaptive Planning is one the first major systems other than our ERP that we wanted to invest in as a finance team,” Bono said. “Everyone on our team – accounting, business operations, financial operations, FP&A – were aligned on making this one of the first priorities for our expanded company.”
Building an innovative finance function with Workday Adaptive Planning
EVERSANA knew it wanted to make the switch to a cloud-based enterprise planning solution. After researching and comparing options, their finance team selected Workday Adaptive Planning.
“Workday Adaptive Planning provided the best combination of functionality and price,” Bono said. “We really liked the ability of OfficeConnect to simplify reporting, and felt like the solution overall was best positioned to simplify our headcount planning.”
Accessing industry insights with Kainos
To maximize its success, EVERSANA knew it would need an implementation partner that could hit the ground running. The company’s private equity partners recommended Kainos.
“They had worked with Kainos with some of the other companies in their portfolio,” Bono said. “We were impressed by the experience implementing Workday Adaptive Planning for other pharma and life science companies that Kainos brought to the table.”
Thanks to that experience, EVERSANA knew that Kainos would be able to help the company meet its aggressive go-live goal while ensuring model accuracy.
Simplifying the deployment journey
Thanks to Kainos, EVERSANA implemented Workday Adaptive Planning in time to meet its go-live deadline.
“The Kainos team was always available and working. They met all their deadlines while taking into account all the intricacies of what we built out in Excel, how our sheets were linked, and where all our different allocations came from, such as different businesses or service areas sharing office space,” Bono said.
Kainos also helped EVERSANA implement best practices for Workday Adaptive Planning while helping the finance team achieve value sooner.
“It was a comprehensive implementation and training all at once. I was able to see exactly how they built it out so I could later go in and make minor tweaks going forward,” Bono said.
“There are very few things where I have to put in a ticket with Kainos to fix something.” Bono mentioned. “That was probably one of the best things that came out of the approach Kainos uses to implement Workday Adaptive Planning.
Saving time and FTEs
Thanks to Kainos and Workday Adaptive Planning, EVERSANA’s finance function can now easily keep pace with the company’s rapid growth.
“OfficeConnect helps us save more than 12 hours each month compiling and completing reporting packages,” Bono said. “We’ve also saved more than 50 hours each planning cycle.”
By having Workday Adaptive Planning in place, EVERSANA’s finance team was able to meet the needs of its company during its growth spurt without having to slow down to hire and train new staff.
“If I were still doing planning in Excel when we went from 500 to 2,000 people, it would have required an additional analyst. We were able to save hiring an additional FTE while improving our accuracy,” Bono said.
What's Next?
As the Eversana finance team continues to leverage Workday Adaptive Planning to automate its planning and reporting, they are now free to focus on driving more value throughout the business.
“It saved a lot of my time and opened my schedule to focus on special projects and strategic level work instead of day-to-day manual work.” Bono said. “I can look for opportunities to help keep our enterprise valuation as high as it can be on a trailing 12 month basis, which is a core focus for our PE partners.”