PHOENIX group
            

The PHOENIX group is a leading healthcare provider in Europe with an annual revenue of 28.2 billion Euro. Every day, approximately 39,000 employees reliably provide medicines and healthcare products to 155 million customers in Europe.

Pharmaceutical wholesale, with its unique area coverage throughout Europe, represents the core business of the company. In a total of 26 countries, PHOENIX supplies pharmacies, doctors and medical facilities through more than 161 distribution centres. PHOENIX also operates
over 2,800 of its own pharmacies in 14 European countries.

PHOENIX group provides specialized logistics, business intelligence and patient services that connect to 200 pharmaceutical companies across Europe. To meet core business priorities, it needs to comply with multiple national and European compliance requirements. To do so, it needed to streamline healthcare process management across many different countries. Different requirements among the pharmaceutical companies that PHOENIX group partners with mean that the company works with a range of protocols around product handling - including how they are stored, monitored, secured, and tracked.

For multinationals like PHOENIX, navigating the maze of national and global regulations makes process management no small task. The time the company spent manually processing all of the requirements using a paper-based system became impossible to sustain as business continued to grow.

“For a long time, we managed our processes using Word documents and other flat files,” says Veronika Ellermann, BPM Method and Tools Specialist, PHOENIX group. “We realized we needed to adapt a better strategy to manage complexity, link processes and applications, and standardize visibility with digital access.”

The company realized that it needed to digitalize as many processes as possible to stay competitive, save valuable time and simplify complexity. At the same time, it had to continue to stay fully complaint while maintaining the same level of service.

Enhancing transparency for a better user experience

PHOENIX group turned to Software AG to implement ARIS Business Design & Strategy and ARIS Rollout & Change Management to interface with and map relevant applications and processes, so users can easily onboard and immediately leverage predefined roles. ARIS helps to flag all processes relevant to GxP requirements. This means PHOENIX resolves common problems with manual documentation, from optimizing its workflows and avoiding costly duplication of processes or roles to providing internal or external auditors with customized lists of relevant processes in just a few clicks.

By optimizing design and modeling strategies, the organization has been able to increase the number of processes running in analog to digital workflows, facilitating the development process for designers. With logical, easy-to-understand, customizable dashboards built in, PHOENIX has a solution that even its newest employees can use daily.

“There are basically two types of roles when it comes to using ARIS. Those who model processes and those who view them,” says Ellermann. “The ease of navigation in ARIS means a much more gratifying user experience for all PHOENIX employees.”

PHOENIX can deliver online training and onboarding materials to the right employees in ARIS exactly when they need them, with no time lost. Using the Software AG solution, PHOENIX has been able to create clean and easy-to-understand dashboards that simplify internal and external processes and eliminate any problems around applying the right rules in the right countries. By driving consistent internal adoption, sufficient data has now been digitized so that the system has evolved into a tool many PHOENIX teams rely on.

“The software scales easily as processes continue to grow with an evolving business and helps identify other opportunities,” says Ellermann. “We absolutely prioritize keeping our content up to date as we process more workflows than ever, and ARIS is being used more consistently throughout the organization.”

The usage of the Software AG solution streamlines role-specific enablement, providing links to work instructions, guidelines and policies to make it easier for employees to collaborate. “What I really appreciate is that people check our different use cases and there are always more questions coming from different stakeholders and internal customers, saying they want to increase the usage and see what other options besides modeling of EPCs and BPMN that ARIS offers,” says Ellermann.

Rapid uptake, countless possibilities

The quick access and visibility to data in the platform have open new possibilities as ARIS solves for the complexity of business processes, enabling PHOENIX group users to be creative with new designs and projects. By closely partnering with Software AG support, the team looks forward to expanding their vision around additional integrations and is exploring the possibility of future process mining for monitoring purposes.

“Aside from the advantages that the Software AG technology gives to our process management system, the level of service has been commendable,” says Ellerman. “I really appreciate the support from the global team at Software AG. They leave no question unanswered and are doing a brilliant job. Their user groups also allow us to connect with other customers, encourage community thinking and see how others are using the application, which I also really appreciate.”