How Alkermes Unlocked $30M in Project Cost Savings with JAGGAER
Alkermes is a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with R&D and manufacturing facilities in the U.S. With $1.5B in annual revenue, Alkermes has focused for more than 30 years on developing innovative treatments for psychiatric and neurological disorders. At a time when 40% of procurement teams said manual and inefficient processes are holding them back[1], the company turned to JAGGAER to improve spend visibility and create standardized workflows across departments and sites. The result has increased usability and brought a 23% reduction in purchase order (PO) processing costs and a 32% reduction in cycle times.
The Challenge: Outdated Procurement, Turbulent Times
When Marcelo Loureiro joined as Head of Global Procurement in 2019, he inherited a “very transactional organization.” Procurement was fragmented across multiple ERP systems (viz., Oracle, SAP), lacked a common taxonomy and offered limited spend visibility. Buyers were stuck in manual, paper-based tasks rather than focusing on strategic value.
“Everyone I talked to on the leadership team saw an opportunity to improve the buying of goods and services.” said Loureiro. “They also recognized the high operational costs, compliance risk, and reduced opportunities to leverage supplier relationships for innovation.”
“We had to provide our users with an Amazon-type of experience when buying goods and services. With this new platform, procurement started being a source of value.”
Marcelo Loureiro, Head of Global Procurement & Trade Compliance, Alkermes
The Solution: Increased Usability, Better Value Delivery
Alkermes launched a converged, intelligent procurement platform. The solution standardized processes and taxonomies across sites. It also implemented a centralized eProcurement catalog and offered guided buying tools to simplify the user experience and ease the administrative burden of internal teams.
The new platform was selected based on its 30 years of industry-specific expertise, as well as its enhanced analytics, which transformed procurement into a strategic business enabler.
Results: Transformation Doesn’t End at Go-Live
The transformation delivered results that extended beyond simple ROI. With this new solution, the impact for Alkermes was immediate and measurable:
· 23% reduction in PO processing costs
· 32% reduction in cycle times
· Significant increase in catalog usage and automatic PO distribution
· Improved reporting agility—moving from 100% IT dependency to flexible analytics
· $30M+ in projected cost savings
Looking ahead, Alkermes is navigating a major ERP transformation to SAP S/4HANA, which will
further integrate procurement with enterprise systems. They are also exploring AI-enabled tools like AppZen for invoice capture and Scope 3 for carbon footprint tracking.
For the organization, the vision remains clear: procurement as a strategic and continuous business enabler, delivering value beyond cost savings—through innovation, supplier partnerships, and ESG.
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