How IQVIA Cut Shared Service Center Costs 40% with Celonis Process Mining

IQVIA operates one of the world’s most complex data and analytics operations in healthcare, serving pharmaceutical and life sciences clients through a global network of 80,000 employees and more than $14 billion in annual revenue. Its Shared Service Center was built with an unusual ambition: not just to reduce costs, but to function as a profit center by actively finding and returning value to the business.

The center handles close management reporting, Procure-to-Pay, Order-to-Cash, and nearly 80% of company payroll. As IQVIA grew—partly through its merger of IMS Health and Quintiles, which left the company operating across multiple ERP systems including SAP and PeopleSoft—the challenge of identifying process inefficiencies at scale became acute. Manual reviews across thousands of employees and disconnected systems made it impossible to find operational waste without enormous effort.

Michael Markman, VP and Head of Financial Shared Services, deployed Celonis’ Execution Management System to provide a unified view across all of IQVIA’s ERP platforms. The system was system-agnostic by design, which was essential given IQVIA’s multi-system environment. Celonis ingested process data across Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay, surfacing inefficiencies that would have been invisible to even the most thorough manual analysis.

In Procure-to-Pay, Celonis identified 190 invoices totaling nearly $30 million that had been misclassified with incorrect payment terms. Correcting the misclassification increased IQVIA’s Days Payable Outstanding by 32 days on average, immediately freeing up $600,000 in working capital. On the receivables side, Celonis helped the team identify billing process inefficiencies that reduced the average time from submission to customer acceptance, directly impacting Days Sales Outstanding—where one day represents approximately $40 million in free cash flow.

Over two years, the Shared Service Center reduced its operating costs by 40% through insourcing and upskilling its workforce toward automation-focused roles. IQVIA built a dedicated Celonis Center of Excellence within shared services, expanding the program from a cost-reduction initiative into a company-wide capability that other business units now actively seek out for process improvement.