Reinvigoration was approached by AstraZeneca to review their expense audit service. Through process mapping and data analysis, Reinvigoration was able to identify areas for improvement and helped AstraZeneca transition their audit service into a shared service centre. This produced financial and compliance benefits for the organisation. Get the full story on how Reinvigoration helped AstraZeneca’s Finance Services deliver on several improvement projects.

Client Overview

AstraZeneca is a global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, founded in 1992 and headquartered in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The company engages in the research, development,  and manufacture of pharmaceutical products for the following therapy areas: oncology, cardiovascular, renal, metabolism, and respiratory.

The Challenge

There were three key issues:

1. AstraZeneca had received negative internal feedback on the process for employee expense reimbursement. They needed to find a way to resolve the issue whilst also seeking efficiency and cost reduction opportunities.
2. It was inefficient for the China office to retain their own audit services while other offices had begun to use the shared service based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
3. The leadership team also wanted to leverage its shared service centre expertise using artificial intelligence and automation to improve efficiency and productivity.

To resolve all these issues, it was clear they needed some expert support.

The Solution

That’s when AstraZeneca approached Reinvigoration. They wanted Reinvigoration to perform an in-depth review of their end-to-end processes, leveraging our expertise to improve their expense audit service.

How Reinvigoration helped:

• We began by evaluating and highlighting solutions to improve the expense audit service using data to evidence the transition to shared services. Following these recommendations, we helped AstraZeneca implement several solutions to their efficiency issues.
• Then, we carried out in-depth process mapping, identifying a series of opportunities for improvement.
• These opportunities for improvement were supported with detailed data analysis using our in-house data visualisation expertise. This allowed us to quantify potential areas of improvement and prioritise the changes to be made.

The Outcomes

Reinvigoration helped AstraZeneca to:

• Highlight to stakeholders at all levels on how and why change should happen based on the extensive current state diagnostic, data analysis and prioritised opportunities.
• Successfully develop a change approach in transitioning into a shared service centre through a series of phases, each with increasing levels of automation. This produced financial and compliance benefits for AstraZeneca.