PwC with Pharma Client – Future Ready

People

PwC’s client, a multinational pharmaceuticals company, recently announced its intention to separate into two new standalone Biopharma and Consumer Healthcare companies.

To ensure both companies will be operationally independent, the client initiated a critical programme to remodel the organisation’s support functions. PwC was asked to join the company’s HR Leadership in designing a future-ready HR function that would do two things: first, enable the successful transition to independent operations; and second, transform the workplace experiences for employees. To do one of these tasks is impressive; to do both at the same time is extraordinary.

Using an innovative employee-experience-led transformation methodology, design thinking, and the introduction of new cloud-based technology, the client/PwC team constructively redesigned processes and ways of working, set up a new delivery model to drive value, and created an environment that would allow employees to do their best work – all while maintaining costs-to-serve in line with industry standards.

Along the transformation journey, COVID-19 disruption caused the team to adapt to a new remote way of working overnight, employing the best collaboration tools and technologies to deliver the programme, as promised, without compromising on timelines. Over 70% of the project was delivered through a remote-working model.

PwC’s approach centred on designing differentiated employee experiences, harnessing the collective acumen and experience of the combined client/PwC team, as well as the client’s workforce. PwC’s Digital Employee Experience analytics capability enabled the team to examine end-to-end user journeys, understand issues that impact workforce experiences and productivity, and prioritise interventions that would deliver the most value.

This allowed the client to balance user-experience priorities with cost, by making informed, data-led choices on where they needed a ‘best-in-class experience’ vs. a ‘best-in-cost/efficient experience that maintains high service quality’.

“Our shared ethos was, at all times, to design for ‘value’ and ‘experience’. The result is a user-experience- and data-insight-led transformation approach that enables expedited decision making and design thinking. Right stakeholders engaged at the right times, ensuring they make agile decisions, adapt in the moment, and implement improvements more quickly. This, in turn, drove business value, customer value, and employee value, with minimum investment.”

– Paritosh Singh, Director, PWC and Head of Delivery Excellence, Pharma Client

The combined team remodelled experiences across Talent, Acquisition, Onboarding, Performance Management, Global Mobility, Reward and more. End-to-end processes were simplified; non-value-add activities removed using lean six sigma techniques; latest best practices; cloud and automation technologies; and the flow of work was aligned to the future-ready delivery model.

Indeed, the client’s two-year programme used the unique catalyst of separation to reset the capabilities and cost base for both companies, and help deliver the significant opportunities to create value in both new entities – leaner, flatter, more agile operations that better reflect the organisation’s future global footprint.

“Designing and delivering a transformation programme whilst preparing in parallel for separation is unique. Intellectualising the challenge was hard work, but incredibly rewarding – doing this with Digital Employee Experience at the heart has been fundamental to the programme.”

– Prasun Shah, Partner, PwC

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