A leading veterinary pharmaceuticals business, our client develops, manufactures and supplies animal health products to customers across Europe and global markets.
The Challenge
Before engaging with e-bate, Norbrook was using an outdated system to manage its rebates. Although it had been fit for purpose many years ago, the old solution didn’t have the capability to evolve with Norbrook’s enhanced business needs. The original solution had aged considerably and was not the modern IT package the business knew it needed.
Although Norbrook’s rebates were not too complex, the process using the old system was administratively intensive and inflexible. Additionally it did not store historical data meaning this had to be downloaded monthly and kept in an offline database, with any prior month recalculations being done manually. With a multi-layered, manual approach to reporting, mistakes were easier to make and monthly processes were time consuming. Finally, the system was used only in the UK and Northern Ireland, leaving divisions overseas to run their rebate processes entirely on excel spreadsheets.
The Solution
e-bate was introduced to replace the existing solution and was implemented globally for Norbrook in a phased roll out. This started with UK and Northern Ireland monthly rebates, before being extended to the rest of the global business in three subsequent phases.
As an early adopter of e-bate, Norbrook had reservations, but as the e-bate team delivered outstanding support, provided the ability to be flexible in implementation and options to amend scope, being an early customer actually ended up being a positive for the business.
The Results
Moving from an outdated system to a fully flexible, fully supported and automated SaaS solution meant that Norbrook could now process huge amounts of data quickly, and with confidence in e-bate.
With e-bate in place, Norbrook now has the flexibility to make its own changes to rebates and deals instantly, giving the business complete control and the ability to make backdated changes with recalculations being performed by the system, instead of through offline manual processes. Furthermore the structure of the master data means mass changes are straightforward.
Since implementing e-bate, Norbrook has enjoyed the reduction in the heavy administrative burden it once had, meaning the team have more time to devote to other value added tasks.
“We have a strong flexible partnership with e-bate who have always been committed to making it work for us. We feel important to them and we know that any issues or concerns will be resolved speedily and with a personal touch”.
