Automate 60-70% of gross-to-net in life sciences management reporting using Workiva and Anaplan

Background

Life sciences manufacturers have begun to face considerable challenges when handling contract flow, membership management, and chargeback/rebate requests. In addition, they are simultaneously dealing with intricate contracts, government regulations, and continual asks to reduce the costs of drugs. To meet these challenges, FP&A leaders are being asked to deliver not only timely reports, but models that enable operational leaders to run various pricing scenarios.

Challenge

To overcome the current challenges facing life sciences manufacturing companies, it is essential to move away from complex error-prone Excel models that feed manually-created PowerPoints. This can be resolved by leveraging Anaplan in combination with Workiva to enable multi-departmental teams to collaboratively model, plan, and report including: 1. Demand team (units) 2. Finance team (forecast gross revenue and costs) 3. Contracts team (negotiated terms with distributors) 4. Accounting team (accruals and true-ups)

Approach

Use Anaplan in combination with Workiva to create a seamless end-to-end planning and reporting architecture that empowers business users to deliver valuable insights in near real time. For a gross-to-net manufacturing company, a common priority would be aiding the FP&A and accounting teams to close the books. With the use of Anaplan, the FP&A team can forecast different scenarios based on the latest assumptions received from the business to create their best data-driven forecast. Once finalized in Anaplan, the Workiva integration transforms the monthly board report into an automated experience requiring little to no human intervention. The process starts with “Wdata”, an integration platform with drag and drop functionality. This integration platform as a service allows the users to own the import of their data from Anaplan into Workiva in order to build their board reports. After validating that the key data has been successfully mapped and imported into Workiva, the team refreshes the data connections to pull the latest data into their presentation. The new results will automatically populate, allowing the team to collaboratively work together to finalize the presentation. The Workiva platform offers a variety of collaboration features including simultaneous user access, commenting capability, assignation of tasks, and due dates all within this one very powerful tool.

Key results

Automated data refreshes into the Anaplan gross-to-net model, as well as from Anaplan into Workiva for automated board reporting

Save the finance team weeks of manual rework every year, thanks to data automation that significantly improves accuracy

Facilitate real-time communication and collaboration between stakeholders to reduce the amount of back-and-forth required every month

Benefits

- Using Anaplan and Workiva, simplify and transform the process from data origination, planning, and decision-making through report distribution. - Enable your multi-departmental teams to collaboratively model and plan for critical FP&A value drivers with integration from multiple data sources. - Streamline your plan to report processes from gross-to-net management with end-to-end board reporting through the integration of Workiva. - Connect plans, data, documents, and teams to elevate your business partnering across the organization and decrease the time allotted to manually create reports, so you can spend more time analyzing them. - Visualize what a real-time connected ecosystem can look like, not just for a team but for an enterprise.