Positioning a pharmaceutical company for an expanded future
KPMG and Oracle helped Insmed organize and upgrade its systems so that it could capitalize on its new opportunities.
Positioning a pharmaceutical company for an expanded future
KPMG and Oracle helped Insmed organize and upgrade its systems so that it could capitalize on its new opportunities.
Client
Insmed
Sector
Healthcare/ Biotech
Project
Global back-office transformation with KPMG Powered Enterprise
Insmed is on a mission to transform the lives of patients living with serious and rare diseases with a vision to be a globally recognized leading biotech company that empowers great people to deliver, with a profound sense of urgency and compassion, life-altering therapies to small patient populations experiencing big health problems. In 2021, Insmed recognized that their existing back-office platform was inadequate to support the anticipated growth. With a series of new drugs in the clinical trial pipeline Insmed is on the verge of a significant business expansion and needed a back-office platform that could grow with them.
The global nature of Insmed’s organization translated into unique business needs from its different business units around the world. Insmed knew they needed to join forces with a company that could help them transform their back-office. They needed a team that had a strong pedigree in Oracle Cloud and that understood what was required for their global VAT tax requirements.
Insmed selected KPMG to help them align and streamline their business processes and to move their Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM) and Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) platforms to Oracle Cloud.
Simply put, Insmed had outgrown its current back-office platform of processes and systems. Its architecture, built on an older version of the Oracle platform, lacked the ability to scale and was unable to meet the company’s expected needs in terms of planning, financial reporting, and operations. There were other drawbacks as well.
It required manual, redundant and non-standardized reporting across multiple regions and through multiple tools. There was not a unified reporting strategy, making it difficult to ensure reports were delivered to the right place. And without standard processes or tools for integrations, the company had to rely on external vendors to monitor its efforts.
All these realities stood in the way of the company’s expansion plans. Before Insmed could move forward, it had to address the gaps in collecting, organizing, and reporting the much larger volume of financial information that the business would require.
In any project, step one is to learn what’s really needed. We then begin with the end in mind and work back from there. In this engagement, we recognized that Insmed’s future state would center on an organized, expanded, and automated ERP system. We would build it on Oracle Cloud using the KPMG Powered Enterprise approach.
During the year-long engagement, the KPMG team involved more than 100 people across change management, business process design, tax, governance risk and controls (GRC) , financials, supply chain and EPM applications, reporting, conversions, and integrations. The solution included chart of accounts conversion, Cloud conversion framework and Cloud integration framework to migrate and integrate data; and we leveraged our prebuilt and process-driven Analytics dashboards as inputs for Report Validation workshops. We unified Insmed systems across the U.S., seven countries in Europe, and Japan.
The scope of our engagement included the integration of finance, supply chain management, EPM (planning and budgeting – and workforce planning). Insmed is now unified on a single platform and a operates with globally defined processes.
To help the transition proceed smoothly, we sent teams to train and consult with Insmed personnel in offices around the world. We listened to their concerns, answered their questions, and spent time working through their issues. The global Insmed team came together and brought their ideas and concerns to the collective table where change happened and was embraced; what emerged was a single team that had a vision for the future and felt empowered to move into the new world they all helped create.
The benefits of the transformation are already becoming apparent. The conversations across the global organization; the focus on performing functions and executing processes rather than just doing transactions; the automation through integration is saving time and manpower even as it improves accuracy and process flow. The system’s information capture, real time reporting, and cross application analytics provide Insmed with a clear picture of its situation, helping the company plan its future. As Insmed grows, it will be able to scale to meet growth demands.
But perhaps even more important than the technical transformations we enabled was the people change we fostered. By helping its people work together across regions, by integrating its systems and accelerating the transparency, we helped Insmed think and act as one organization. Insmed has evolved and grown. It is truly one company now, working harmoniously across the globe, ready to bring new life-changing products to the pharmaceutical market and helping to better the lives of patients everywhere.