Client Spotlight EMD Pharmaceuticals

EMD Pharmaceuticals manages growth through automation

In addition to offices in North Carolina, EMD Pharmaceuticals has a pilot production plant in Billerica, Massachusetts. Two-thirds of EMD Pharmaceutical's 130 employees are engaged in international travel and the company manages $2.4 million in travel spend annually. EMD Pharmaceuticals wanted to automate travel and expense management in anticipation of increases in nationwide staffing and to better manage increasing international T&E costs.

A Business Challenge
EMD Pharmaceuticals is a growth-oriented, entrepreneurial company. Because the company relied on an inefficient manual system to manage T&E expenses, finance staff spent an excessive amount of time processing individual expense report details. The reimbursement cycle took weeks, paper archives required extensive storage, and the company possessed little organizational data about T&E spend.

With the implementation of the Gelco outsourced automated solution, EMD Pharmaceuticals expected to: 

• reduce expense report processing time
• reimburse travelers promptly
• achieve insight into organizational spend
• provide independent reviews and audits
• redefine T&E policies and expectations
• streamline VAT recovery

"It was essential for us to refocus finance staff attention from individual expense report details to larger operational issues," said Cindy Williams, EMD Pharmaceuticals Financial Accountant. "Gelco clearly understood how our plans for growth affected our selection of an expense management solution."

The Gelco Solution helps EMD Pharmaceuticals target areas for training, refine travel policies, and conduct independent audits
A pilot group of employees at EMD Pharmaceuticals was responsible for defining the criteria to be configured in Gelco's ExpenseLink and Imaging and Audit Services. The pilot group worked to achieve a number of practical goals to streamline the complete T&E expense management process, which included:

• quick access to scanned documents through CD-ROM and on-line
• reinforcement of existing T&E policies
• introduction of new policies and guidelines

Gelco's automated solution was an ideal fit with the company's team approach to T&E management—Human Resources, EMD managers, and finance staff work together to create policies, review expenses, evaluate and analyze data, and train and educate users.

With Gelco, EMD Pharmaceuticals has improved its T&E expense management process and has successfully:

• reduced processing time while increasing transactions
• solidified existing guidelines and introduced new policies
• provided access to all expense documents at the touch of a button
• utilized standard audit criteria to target areas for training and refine travel guidelines
• conducted independent reviews
• achieved insight into organizational spend
• eliminated paper archives, saving storage costs and retrieval inefficiencies

Gelco's powerful Imaging and Audit Services allows EMD Pharmaceuticals to use a targeted approach to the complete review and audit process, which saves time and money.