Optimising Pharma Supply Chain Payments

Synopsis

Despite being a payments technology company, Mastercard struggled to improve the efficiency of its supply chain payments operations, and we’d like to understand how this compares with pharma, which will be far more complex
– Mastercard has 30,000+ Purchase requisitions a year across 180 countries
– Payment terms were disparate – we aimed to standardise terms across our supplier base
– We created a tool called Global Treasury Intelligence to become the “air traffic control” for Mastercard’s Sourcing and Supplier team
– It’s given us visualisation across our ERP and Procure to Pay systems unified into a single interface, enabling us to drill into the data (historically has needed to be manually joined)
– Benefits include: visibility into multiple payment terms; payment timing; payment method; contracted vs non-contracted spend – all in one place
– We spend 75% less time on manually joining data points, make greater use of cards for supplier payments, and we can use this to negotiate better terms with suppliers
– We see this area as ripe for innovation in pharma – where payments often remain analogue, manual and costly