Wren Therapeutics is a biotechnology company created from a joint research project between the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and Lund University in Sweden. Their team of scientists is dedicated to discovering and developing medication for the treatment of protein misfolding diseases.
The challenges
When Joe Wilson joined Wren Therapeutics as Financial Controller, he wanted to prime the organization for growth. To help successfully scale their team, he’d need to help scale their operations, too — so he set out to find a solution to help automate Wren’s spend approval and tracking process.
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Inefficient purchasing process: Lab purchasing consisted of time-consuming manual processes using Excel spreadsheets and emails, resulting in significant delays to get scientists the supplies they needed.
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Lack of spend controls: Although there were policies in place for requesting approvals before purchases were made, they were difficult to enforce and oftentimes neglected by teams.
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Reconciliation headaches: Invoices had to be manually matched to their original purchase requests. This labor-intensive and error-prone process was frustrating for Finance, and made it difficult to prepare financial reports.
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Lack of spend analytics: A lack of visibility into actual vs expected spending in real-time made it impossible for Joe to catch over- or underspending before it was too late. Consequently, this slowed down their month-end close process.
The solution
After evaluating three other purchasing solutions, Wren turned to Procurify to help streamline their processes and implement controls to enforce budget discipline.
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Improved spend controls: Wren can now set approval limits between locations and departments, and track spend by project. Approval routing and the user-friendly Procurify Mobile App ensure that approvers can easily monitor important requests.
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Real-time spend analytics and tracking: Visibility into budgets allows scientists to put more resources into their projects, or slow down on purchasing, depending on how much they’ve spent to date. From a financial controls perspective, Joe no longer needs to wait until month-end to see if each project, location, or department is spending more or less than projected in any given month or year.
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Financial oversight and closing the books: Using Procurify, Wren can easily monitor the receipt of invoices and spend more time focused on high-priority orders that need more oversight from the finance team. Joe can also trace invoices back to the original contract and quickly access all of the related details.
Takeaways
The role of Procurement in biotechnology organizations is to free up time so scientists can concentrate on research and development, not administrative tasks such as purchasing and chasing managers for approvals.
For Wren to break through with new developments in the protein misfolding field, particularly in disease areas with extensive and urgent unmet needs (such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease), time is of the essence. The faster they get to their goals, the more lives they’ll positively impact. Today, their scientists are able to focus their valuable time on core research while using Procurify to easily request what they need.
Learn how Procurify can help your biotechnology organization:
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Automate time-intensive and error-prone manual processes between purchasing and accounts payable
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Enforce responsible spend with predictable workflows and structured approvals for every user across different teams, departments, and locations
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Provide your entire organization with real-time spend visibility to make more budget-informed decisions
