International CRO ClinChoice dramatically improves finance processes with Dynamics 365

ClinChoice is a global contract research organization (CRO) with prominent presences in China, the United States, Armenia, India, and over 20 other countries around the world. It provides clinical development services to biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies. ClinChoice offers a wide spectrum of solutions for clinical development, biometrics, drug safety, medical affairs, regulatory consulting, and more. With an international client base, numerous contracts, and the complexities involved in any clinical research project, ClinChoice faced difficulties managing time, scope, and labor costs, as well as ensuring every project meets regulatory compliance in the countries it operates in. To help manage these challenges across the lifecycle of its projects, the company chose Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Project Operations to consolidate its ERP systems. With this new system, ClinChoice has a clearer picture of costs, regulatory requirements, and timelines, improving efficiency and coordination throughout their CRO projects.

“Data accuracy and timeliness are direct benefits of our ERP system on Dynamics 365. Another benefit is the process improvement—the global team can now accurately and efficiently follow standardized business processes across the end-to-end CRO project cycle.”

Ling Zhen, Board Chairman and Global CEO, ClinChoice

The development of innovative new drugs is a lengthy process lasting 12 years or more with three main stages: discovery research, preclinical development, and clinical studies. ClinChoice is a leading full-service clinical CRO that specifically focuses on the clinical stage of development through helping its pharmaceutical and biotechnology clients to conduct clinical trials on humans around the world. Since its inception 25 years ago, the company has established a full-service capability to conduct clinical trials worldwide with over 4,000 employees in more than 30 countries.

Though it provides services within the life sciences industry, ClinChoice is really a data company. For compliance reasons, ClinChoice keeps external data—patient and clinical data—in a separate system from internal data—project, employee, and finance data. To consolidate its internal data and kick-off its digital transformation initiative, ClinChoice built an ERP (enterprise resource planning) platform with Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Power Platform.

Error-prone manual processes

Before Dynamics 365, each subsidiary had its own processes to track finances. ClinChoice didn’t have a global standard process for using or sharing data, preventing the company from securely or compliantly sharing data between offices. The old system only provided a general ledger function to generate financial statements, so employees were manually managing timesheets, invoices, and project-related tasks (deliverables, costs, budgets, milestones, timelines, and scope).

It was a full-time job for everyone on the finance team to manage financial processes—resulting in inaccuracies—and they often required overtime to hit their deliverables and SLAs (service level agreements). A financial closing was a slow, manual process, often taking a month to complete.

An organization-wide impact

In 2020, ClinChoice began its digital transformation journey with an ERP consolidation project at its headquarters in China. It built its ERP platform on Dynamics 365 Finance, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Power Platform. ClinChoice uses Power BI for analysis and visualization, and the platform also integrates with Office 365. After only six months, ClinChoice completed implementation and was able to roll out the ERP platform to the rest of the company. ClinChoice consolidated finance, employee, and customer data from every office, and all 4,000 employees have access to the ERP platform. The platform has been in use for a total of three years.

Ling Zhen, Board Chairman and Global CEO of ClinChoice says, “Data accuracy and timeliness are direct benefits of our ERP system on Dynamics 365. Another benefit is the process improvement—the global team can now accurately and efficiently follow standardized business processes across the end-to-end CRO project cycle.”

Since the launch of its Dynamics 365-based ERP system. ClinChoice has improved finance processes, including tracking project costs, vendor payments, and invoicing. ClinChoice has also streamlined its billing cycle and increased visibility into project budget planning—and it’s much quicker and more accurate in matching revenue to the proper deliverable now. The finance team saves operations costs because overtime is no longer needed for monthly financial reconciliations. Christy Shen, CFO at ClinChoice, says, “Using Dynamics 365, we’ve reduced financial closings from a month to seven or eight business days.” That’s four calendar weeks down to one.

“The biggest savings, which we haven’t been able to quantify, is the time saved across the organization after automating so much manual work, reconciliation work, and firefighting work,” says Shen.

Exceeding expectations

With three years of successful implementation behind it, ClinChoice is exploring future possibilities for the platform. It is looking into using OCR for reading and filling out invoices and Dynamics 365 Copilot to help write marketing emails based on CRM data. And for automating mass email marketing, it’s investigating how to integrate Microsoft Outlook and Power Platform.

Most immediately, Zhen sees how the ERP platform will help ClinChoice integrate data from businesses it acquires.

For now, the ERP platform built with Dynamics 365 services has far exceeded the expectations of ClinChoice employees. Christy Shen at ClinChoice says, “We anticipate that the platform will help fuel the productivity and inspire the passion of ClinChoice employees,” helping ClinChoice manifest its mission to make the world healthier and safer by accelerating drug and device development.

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