Pharma company enables spend management in many categories, data capture for analysis
Sunnyvale, CA December 8, 2003 Merck & Co. Inc., a global research-driven pharmaceutical products and services company, announced this week that it will continue its commitment with enterprise spend management (ESM) solutions provider Ariba to further support its company-wide spend management initiative.
Merck added to its Ariba Buyer procurement solution with Ariba Enterprise Sourcing, Ariba Analysis, Ariba Contracts and Ariba Invoice.
Merck has used Ariba Buyer since 1998, deploying the solution to 30 sites in 11 countries around the globe, and transacting one million purchase orders annually.
Merck's use of the ESM solution set continues to drive the organization to greater efficiencies. "Merck recognizes the benefit in spend management functionality leveraged via the Ariba platform to effectively capture and manage more global spend, and provide key decision makers with access to data for timely and improved decision support," said Noreen Higgins, director, Global Procurement, Merck.
According to Ariba, Enterprise Sourcing enables professional buyers at Merck to electronically automate and manage the complete sourcing process, including locating suppliers, generating requests for quotations and negotiating contract terms. The Analysis software enables Merck to gain visibility into its spending, determine spend patterns and identify opportunities for savings. Ariba Contracts is designed to automate and streamline Merck's contract management processes.
"Merck is pleased with the results achieved over the past several years utilizing Ariba Buyer and is ready to expand its spend management initiative with additional Ariba Spend Management solutions," said Jeanne Stahl, vice president, Global Procurement. "The integration of the Ariba solutions to each other, and to our back-end systems, enables us to manage spend in many categories and to capture valuable spend data for ongoing analysis, reporting and spend management planning.
