About the Company

Servier Pharma is the most important independent French pharmaceutical company, with a turnover of over 3.6 billion Euros. Servier Pharma has in its portfolio products for major importance diseases and is present in over 140 countries.

The Romanian representation office was opened in 1996. In 1996, the company started with one person, at present the Romanian branch numbering over 300 employees.

Initial Situation

“Initially, for the budget we used to work with a table calculation application and we had two problems in creating budgets. The first problem was that it took a lot of time to build a budget, and the second problem was that we could never have a clear situation of expenses versus budget”, declared Laurentiu Bogdan, IT Manager – Servier Pharma.

“We either took each invoice and introduced it into a separate table and thus we could compare what had been budgeted and what had been spent, or we waited for a report issued by the financial department, which did not resemble our budget. They were monitoring expenses in one way, we had them organized in another way, much les complicated, and then there was a rather big discrepancy between what I knew that had been spent and what was registered in the accounting books”, continued Laurentiu Bogdan.

Considering these issues, Servier Pharma (Romania) decided to develop a budget management specialized application. Servier chose ITCenter Company, a company with great experience in the development of applications on the.NET. platform.

The Solution

“Budget Watch initially began as an application created on request by ITCenter Company for Servier Pharma (Romania). In time and by adding new functionalities, Budget Watch became a different product which could be implemented <> or maybe personalized according to the requirements of various companies”, specified Andrei Tesio, Executive Manager – ITCenter Company

Budget Watch is developed based on the newest Microsoft technologies. The application is extremely easy to set up even in multiple-users environments. This is a consequence of the integration of the ClickOnce technology, one of the most efficient application deployment technologies. ClickOnce is a Microsoft technology for the implementation of software based on Windows Forms and Windows Presentation Foundation platforms, also called Smart Clients. ClickOnce is available on .NET 2.0 platforms or subsequent. ClickOnce basic principles are the simplification and stability of web applications, for the development of client applications for Windows.

From the architectural point of view, as a consequence of the large number of mobile users within Servier Pharma (Romania), Budget Watch presents a dual model. In this sense, within the organization intranet, the solution traditionally communicates using the TCP/IP protocol. For communication beyond the Internet, Budget Watch uses an architecture based on secured Web services.

Budget Watch has a last generation interface based on “ribbon” elements of Office 2007 and 2010. The application, in the configuration based on web services and having a demonstrative data base, may be tested on the address http://www.budgetwatch.ro/Demo.aspx .

Also, Budget Watch uses SQL Server Express (the free version of SQL Server), which mitigates the total ownership costs of the solution.

From the functional point of view, Budget Watch brings important advantages. The application offers, by one interface, three perspectives on the business: the business perspective (specific to the budget-management department), the finance and accounting perspective (required by the legislation in the field) and the allocation of budgets from the organizational structure perspective.

From the business perspective point of view, the officer may built the budget according to 3 main splitting levels, each of them being able to have as many positions as wanted. The department heads have the possibility to monitor the budget execution at any moment by emphasizing the comparative FORECAST versus ACTUAL.

From the finance and accounting point of view, the application gives easy access to the perspective of distribution of budgeted and spent amounts (by the IT officer), both for each department, and for each account category, so that the communication within the company becomes extremely easy.

Benefits

Budget Watch uses functions that automate and allow the automatic generation of the budget for certain components. For instance, the HR department forecasts that in the following 3 years, X persons will be employed in various departments. According to the position of the person, the equipments that must be purchased are thus known, and then the system, containing these data, may propose certain amounts into the budget.

An important advantage of this solution is the possibility to consolidate the data for the budgets of various departments within the organization. By the “General Manager (GM) View” centralized module, the general manager has a global image on the budget execution stage. Moreover, managers may use “drill-down” functions by which they may visualize detailed data and identify the causes that have determined certain evolutions.

Budget Watch uses an advanced security model. Technically, there are three basic categories of users and manners of budget visualization: GM View (visualizes all budget officers), budget officer (visualizes and modifies the data related to several departments) and head of department (visualizes and modifies the data of the department that he manages).

The flexible reporting system of Budget Watch is also an advantage. In this sense, N reports may be executed, as long as the data are in a centralized system from where they may be managed much more easily in the entire solution.

“After the implementation of the application, I managed to have a real-time image of the budget achievement degree. By implementing this solution we see that the efficiency has improved compared to the table calculation application by at least 50%”, concluded Laurentiu Bogdan.

In short …

Company Profile

Servier Pharma is the most important independent French pharmaceutical company, with a turnover of over 3.6 billion Euros. Servier Pharma has in its portfolio products for major importance diseases and is present in over 140 countries.

Situation

Inefficiency of the table calculation solution to create a complex budget.

Solution

Budget Watch – an application developed to cover Servier Pharma's (Romania) budget needs.

Benefits

• Increase budget creating efficiency by 50%
• Real-time image of the budget and of what has been achieved
• Efficient organization and prevention of interdepartmental data transmission
• Simple set-up process by ClickOnce
• Construction of a modern architecture based on Web services.