How IQVIA Cut Shared Service Center Costs 40% with Celonis Process Mining
IQVIA, the global healthcare data and analytics company with 80,000 employees and $14B in annual revenue, deployed Celonis’ Execution Management System across its Shared Service Center to eliminate process inefficiencies in Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay. Within two years, the initiative reduced Shared Service Center operating costs by 40%, freed up $600,000 in working capital immediately, and generated millions in cumulative savings.
Impact
40%
Reduction in Shared Service Center operating cost
$600,000
Working capital freed immediately
32 days
DPO improvement
Challenge
IQVIA’s Shared Service Center operated across multiple ERP systems following a major corporate merger, with no unified view of process performance—making it impossible to identify payment misclassifications, billing delays, and cash flow inefficiencies without manual interviews across thousands of global employees.
Solution
Celonis’ Execution Management System was deployed across IQVIA’s Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay processes to aggregate data from multiple ERPs into a unified process intelligence layer, automatically surfacing misclassifications, delays, and inefficiencies with no manual investigation required.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Finding value in the company is a little bit like a treasure hunt. And the way that Celonis helps is it identifies things that you just wouldn’t be able to find even if you had unlimited time.”
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Full Story
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.
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