There are key inflection points in any organizational journey when you realise that the systems, technology, and thinking that got you here, won’t get you there. When things go well, these moments happen in good times when the growth that you’re seeing is breaking the old ways of doing things, and you’re forced to adapt in order to harness that success.

In this case study, we look at one of those exact moments for a leading biopharma company who turned to Cubewise to help them scale up their operations quickly and effectively, so that they could manage the launch of an exciting new product.

The company in question aims to deliver medicines that make a real difference in peoples’ lives. By leveraging decades of expertise in the field, they developed an FDA-approved product for respiratory disease.

They has been using IBM Planning Analytics / TM1 as their primary budgeting and planning tool for about 15 years now, through a range of acquisitions, divestitures, and management changes. It is the one constant that has supported their dynamic journey so far, but recently they turned to Cubewise to help them take it to the next level.

What were the challenges?

As a fast-growing small company, they are always in a state of constant flux. Adapting and evolving to changing market circumstances means that the financial planning and analytics need to be as agile as possible in order to keep up. The CFO was very well acquainted with the challenges here and it’s what drew him to IBM Planning Analytics in the first place: “Being able to flex based on the business need is a core competency of any robust FP&A system. We need our technology to grow and scale with us if we are to continually drive things in the right direction.”

The internal financial processes at the time involved a lot of spreadsheet work that had to be passed back and forth between team members before it could be uploaded to the IBM Planning Analytics system itself. This is common with small biotech firms, but it was something that they wanted to change in order to gain more agility and to allow for more efficient processes where financial information could be dynamic and flexible.

What solution was implemented?

Cubewise helped to implement an online instantiation of IBM Planning Analytics which would negate the need for spreadsheets to be passed back and forth. Instead, team members could take ownership of their part of the planning process and input data directly, rather than through the finance department which would unwillingly become the bottleneck for information flow.

This cloud-based implementation would offer all the same functionality that the company was used to, but in a format that made for significantly improved results.

In addition, to manage and harness the complexity within the organization, the Cubewise team also helped to set up a directed budgeting process that was crafted step-by-step to remove friction and make the entire endeavour as smooth and effective as possible.

What were the results?

Just having the web implementation on its own made the whole process a lot smoother. It allowed the finance team to spend more time on analysing and interpreting company data (which could lead to more insightful business decisions) and less on pure input which wasn’t a good use of their valuable time. Aligned with this, end users could layer in their specific data directly which saved a lot of time and got everyone buying into the process from across the company.

The CFO mentioned that “this process helped me to challenge my staff and ensure that they are thinking through things carefully. Instead of just dumping data on finance and expecting them to find the insights, it placed the responsibility back onto each team member which makes for a more cohesive and holistic approach.”

It also opened up a range of new opportunities for sales and COGS product analysis, as well as collaborations both internally and externally, because the data was transparent, available, and in a trusted single system which became the source of truth.

Cubewise is very proud to have guided a client with this important mission along this journey and we can’t wait to see what they do with the newfound efficiencies and capabilities.