Submitter
Ash Mehta, Director, Digital Finance
Company
Pfizer
Industry
Pharmaceuticals
Business Challenge
At Pfizer, our purpose is to deliver breakthroughs that changes patients’ lives. Operating in over 125 countries, Pfizer faces a complex environment and fast changing business conditions. This creates many challenges in financial planning, budgeting and forecasting, including the need to be agile and responsive, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition, like any other global company, financial planning activities can be time consuming. Some processes rely on offline excel templates, email communications and manual processes which make it harder to get timely information.
Analytics Solution
As a leader in innovation, Pfizer needed an analytical solution that transforms its operations and planning activities. The digital collaboration and automation platform that was developed is called Lighthouse. The platform uses leading edge statistical, machine learning and predictive techniques to develop quarterly revenue and expense forecasts and a 10-year operating plan. Finance and Commercial Brand teams can now partner by using real time information flows, accelerating the process of creating budgets and forecasts, making work faster and easier. Standardizing on a scalable solution replaces manual processes and localized spreadsheets. Designed with an intuitive interface and data visualization capabilities, Lighthouse provides a full end-to-end user experience.
Impact
As of March 2021, Lighthouse has been deployed to almost 100 countries, representing over 90% of revenues. User feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The time needed to prepare forecasts has decreased significantly. Repetitive tasks and offline excel templates have been reduced by over 20%. Management reviews have been completed in half the time and the number of process steps has decreased by over 50% in certain markets. Local and global leadership teams receive financial information faster, allowing them to make key decisions quickly. Lighthouse provides Pfizer with the platform and tools that help deliver the right outcomes, generate time savings and accelerate key processes.