Business Benefits:
This was to be done with the goal of reducing contract turnaround time, creating standardization across product lines, and developing more accurate analysis in the contract generation phase. Due to frequent changes in contracting policies, Roche also required the ability to have full control over the behavior of the application -- free from software developers.

Challenges:
Upon engagement, the pricing and contracting process at Roche was extremely fragmented. The process was manually done through complex spreadsheets that varied across different product lines. The complexities with the Roche project surfaced from several constraints. Roche had complex rules and sophisticated analysis, with frequent changes to policies. Additionally they faced multiple types of contracting entities, each with different rules. The business rules and intelligence were to be centralized within their pricing, contracting and legal groups, but implemented in the sales force. Additionally, the contracting team had to face compliance issues and maintain control and standardization over the contracts that were delivered to the client,including a complex workflow process in order to approve different contracting options. Above all, the application had to be configurable from a business owner through some modeling environment, because the policies and workflow could potentially change from month to month or week to week.

Outcome:
Core Concept business analysts were called into action and first went to work documenting the current manual process. The principal business problems we faced were to capture the business intelligence from their contracting, pricing, and legal departments. Following the initial analysis, CCI professionals worked in conjunction with decision makers at Roche to refine their processes for automation.

• Complex decision making for contract generation across multiple entities and product lines.
  
• Complex and configurable workflow that allowed significant offloading of reviews and approvals for straightforward contracts to the field based on the business intelligence. This meant that only complex and exception contracts needed the full attention of the corporate groups.
  
• Document generation which resulted in standardized pdf and html contracts that have already been approved by the legal team.
  
• Full integration with IMS and CARS (using the allowed for the contracts to be dynamically generated using data from IMS and uploaded into CARS automatically.
  
• Reporting functionality that allowed for close watch on contract activity and performance. Roche also required the reporting feature to be flexible, therefore the Ad Hoc reporting functionality was also incorporated to provide this flexibility.

The first version of the project was successfully implemented in 4 months. The full web based version allowed analysis and rules to be managed by the Roche pricing group, reducing the need for developers. Implementation of the project resulted in a significant improvement in contract turn around time from 2-4 weeks to 2-3 days, with over thousand contracts fully generated by the customized version of Contract Prodigy™. This not only resulted in improved turn around for Roche, but also greater accuracy of information when generating contracts, contract standardization, and an easy implementation of contracting policies that mitigated pricing risks. All this was done through the coordination of several departments through a seamless and easily configurable workflow.