FIS creates a remedy for finance and supply chain improvement

At Fabbrica Italiana Sintetici (FIS), a leading contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), producing innovative pharmaceuticals requires both speed and precision. “The time to market of new drugs and new therapies is shortening,” explains Manuel Barreca, CFO at FIS. “We are working in a very fast environment, and we need to support our customers with high quality products for their final drugs.” In this accelerated business climate, a three-month budgeting cycle — outsourced to an advisor — consumed too much time.

Barreca made the strategic decision to bring financial processes and reporting in-house and sought a platform on which his team could build new, innovative business processes. “We were looking for a cloud solution to reduce our IT investment, and to work with an experienced company to develop the platform,” Barreca recalls. They chose Anaplan.

Removing barriers, improving decisions

”Anaplan supported FIS since the beginning of our transformation,” Barreca continues. “We did not have experience with cloud solutions, but the support from the Anaplan team made the transition painless. We were able to develop the platform starting from the financial consolidation, up to the integrated planning that we have today.”

The FIS team has also built supply and demand planning models on the Anaplan platform. Finance and supply chain applications work in concert, enabling FIS to keep pace with its industry and support its customers.

“What really works better in our business thanks to Anaplan is the fact that we are able finally to take decisions on data,” says Barreca. “We are able to remove the barriers between teams and, ultimately, to have better forecast accuracy.”

Accelerating processes, building connections

By replacing its outsourced budget cycle with real-time data access in the Anaplan platform, the finance team at FIS can run multiple “what-if” scenarios in the three-month timeframe formerly needed to build a single budget. The team has also cut end-of-month financial reporting time by two-thirds, Barreca notes: “The month-end closing has moved from 15 days to five working days.”

On the supply chain side, an inventory management model in Anaplan delivers new insight to support smarter procurement. “We are able to track the stock rotation precisely for each product,” Barreca explains. “In this way, we are able to support the planning team for better raw material purchasing.”

Using Anaplan, FIS has reaffirmed its position as a CDMO industry leader while building collaboration and connection throughout the company. “I'm really proud of the Anaplan implementation because it started as a finance project — and today the whole company understands the importance of our integrated planning solution,” Barreca concludes.