When one of the world's major pharmaceutical companies decides to streamline its enterprise-wide purchasing processes, it needs a solution that is rich in product data, requisition consolidation, reporting and catalogue management, and one that is capable of integration with other enterprise software systems.
With total pharmaceutical sales up nine per cent to E28 billion in the last year, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) is the largest pharmaceutical company in Europe and the second-largest on the planet. Today it has captured seven per cent of the world's entire market and boasts eight of the world's top 50 products. So when the company decided to streamline its enterprise-wide purchasing processes, it needed a very functional product.
As a result, GSK has selected SciQuest's SelectSite Sourcing and Requisition Application (SRA) e-procurement solution. This is an enterprise software solution that gives users the capability to search, source and order scientific supplies from multiple suppliers.
The software is designed to drive adoption of customers' existing electronic procurement systems while reducing non-contract and off-contract spending. At GSK, this means working with Ariba Buyer, a system which is designed to help companies increase procurement efficiency and their ability to track and control spends by automating the entire buying cycle, from requisition to payment. This system is designed to automate alerts and workflow, streamlining the end-to-end procurement process.
In turn, this boosts productivity and process efficiency, enabling users to concentrate spending on preferred suppliers and manage compliance with negotiated contracts. It also provides reporting and analysis tools that track data useful for negotiations, trend analysis, contract and user compliance, and strategic spend planning.
SRA's two million products from more than 1000 suppliers combined with the powerful search tools, rich product data, requisition consolidation, reporting, catalogue management and integration with other enterprise software systems, are expected to contribute to a more efficient and effective product sourcing and requisitioning process at GSK.
"This agreement with GlaxoSmithKline is designed to benefit their worldwide R&D procurement processes,“ said Stephen J Wiehe, ceo of SciQuest. "We understand that research organisations have unique product sourcing needs, and we have developed SelectSite SRA specifically to address those needs. Additionally, SelectSite SRA was also designed to add deep product specific content, search and sourcing tools that enhance the value of enterprise procurement applications such as Ariba. This robust solution is ideal for driving strategic sourcing throughout the entire enterprise,“ he added.
The key points of the agreement are that the SelectSite SRA solution will support GSK's Ariba implementation in both the US and the UK, and that it will provide the company with catalogue management, sourcing, and requisitioning, and reporting tools to manage its laboratory supplies, chemicals, and equipment spend worldwide.
"We are very pleased that another leader in the research community such as GlaxoSmithKline has selected SciQuest SelectSite SRA to enable the sourcing and requisitioning of all of their critical research supplies,“ said Wiehe. "This is an important milestone in SciQuest's growth and in our continued commitment to offer enterprise-level and domain-specific solutions that help scientific organisations enhance their research capabilities.“
Buyer's guide web portal
In another recent development, SciQuest has launched a new public buyer's guide web porta that allows enables scientists to search over 1.5 m life science products such as laboratory supplies, chemicals and equipment, from a single site.
The buyer's guide portal is entirely free and enables researchers to source products by searching the largest database of scientific products in the world, all through one single site, and to prepare a aready-to-send' requisition that they can either fax directly to suppliers or forward to their procurement office for processing. The SciQuest buyer's guide can be found at http://www.sciquest.com/buyersguide.
"The new SciQuest Buyer's Guide is a very powerful tool,“ said Wayne Litaker, of the Molecular Biology and Biotechnology department of the University of North Carolina's School of Medicine. "It's so much easier and more effective than surfing supplier sites individually. The search engine is fast and easy to use, and the database is massive. I will certainly start all my product searches here from now on.“
Its home page features an integrated set of sourcing functionalities that enable the scientist to: u Search for products across a range of scientific categories or focus the search on a specific set of products. u Browse an extensive directory tree of product categories to follow a logical trail to the products of interest. u Locate a specific supplier and request a catalogue. u Access new product information. u Follow interactive links to additional rich product information on suppliers' web sites.
When combined with SciQuest's electronic catalogue of 1.5 m life science products from over 750 suppliers, these capabilities should give bioscientists a new level of flexibility and performance in their approach to scientific product sourcing.
From the buyer's guide portal, researchers are also able to directly access BioSupplyNet, the ayellow pages' of bioscience vendors with more than 3500 categorised supplier listings. Scientists are also able to browse the latest research breakthroughs on the SciCentral news and information site.
"Our goal is to leverage SciQuest's industry experience to provide research-intensive organisations with tools that solve real research and business problems,“ concluded Guy Orgambide, director of science community with SciQuest. u
