Roche: Taking a lead in the data-driven revolution of the healthcare industry by offering digital subscription services
Explore Roche’s journey with SAP
Leading biotech company F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Roche) sought to realize its ambitions to offer digital healthcare services. Teaming up with Accenture, Roche integrated the SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management solutions with its existing infrastructure, creating a gold-standard customer experience for its subscription services.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Healthcare | Basel, Switzerland | >101,000 employees | Accenture |
digital products enabled for digital distribution.
months for first go-live in three countries.
countries live in one year.
Product Manager, Subscribe to Retire Digital Products, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Healthcare | Basel, Switzerland | >101,000 employees | Accenture |
digital products enabled for digital distribution.
months for first go-live in three countries.
countries live in one year.
Product Manager, Subscribe to Retire Digital Products, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
Building capabilities to deliver digital solutions to customers
F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Roche) is one of the world’s largest biotech companies, a leading provider of in vitro diagnostics, and a global supplier of transformative innovative solutions across major disease areas. Established more than 125 years ago, the company is committed to improving the health of people around the world.
With advances in innovative technology and availability of meaningful data at scale, Roche saw the opportunity to accelerate its digital transformation and take a lead in the data-driven revolution of the healthcare industry. The company wanted to offer digital subscription services aimed at empowering people to manage their health better, allow healthcare providers to confidently diagnose and treat diseases, and help healthcare institutions unlock greater efficiency.
Mindful of the pervasive on-demand subscription services setting a high benchmark in frictionless, flexible, and easy-to-use experiences, Roche knew its foray into offering subscription services would have to measure up to this gold standard. To do so would include enabling customers to sign up for new services quickly and easily, add new capabilities, buy upgrades, and put an immediate pause on their subscriptions.
With an IT landscape and business processes designed for physical products, Roche lacked the capabilities to deliver digital solutions to customers in keeping with these on-demand subscription services experiences.
To find another way, an in-depth analysis of different solutions ensued, with Roche’s team concluding that SAP’s quote-to-cash management offerings provided the best fit to tackle the challenge. Key factors influencing the decision included the ability to meet an aggressive timeline for implementation and time to value for adding subscriptions to existing products and services. SAP also offered capabilities to support current and future business models with complex pricing parameters, recurring fees, allowances, and usage plans. And since solutions from SAP formed the backbone of digital transformation journeys for many other companies, Roche was looking forward to leveraging proven best practices.
Product Manager, Subscribe to Retire Digital Products, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
Automating order to cash to shape the distribution of digital products
Roche refers to its initiative to implement the SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management solutions as its “software monetization platform,” or SMP.
SMP automates the order-to-cash process for Roche’s digital offerings, including order fulfillment, entitlement, invoicing and billing, and revenue recognition. The platform connects to Roche’s IT landscape by taking advantage of SAP’s open APIs with a composable architecture.
To create this central foundation for the distribution of digital products, Roche’s internal team joined forces with a cross-functional, expert team from SAP and Accenture. Together, they linked SAP Subscription Billing to Roche’s existing infrastructure, establishing a single source of truth for Roche’s digital offerings. The setup allows Roche to manage the product catalog and pricing and access the financial back end to manage the billing, invoicing, accounts receivable, taxes, and revenue accounting.
SAP Entitlement Management uses subscription information from SAP Subscription Billing and interfaces with Roche’s customer service and provisioning systems to help manage order fulfillment and customer entitlements.
Another factor critical to the success of the project was having business users involved from the very beginning, allowing adjustments to be made quickly, based on user feedback. With an agile greenfield implementation, Roche completed the initial implementation in just four and a half months across three countries.
Product Manager, Subscribe to Retire Digital Products, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
Meeting customer expectations with business model flexibility
After just one year, Roche’s SMP is now live in 16 markets and integrates with eight enterprise IT systems to deliver a compelling user experience. Through SMP, Roche has rapidly scaled the commercialization of its digital business thanks to an automated order-to-cash process, including order fulfillment, billing, invoicing, taxes, and revenue recognition. SMP currently supports 16 digital products, and there are plans to arrive at over 50 more products.
The functionality offered by SAP Subscription Billing allows Roche to meet current and future needs, with the agility to create offerings with flexible pricing and billing options. This includes subscriptions, usage plans, one-time fees, tiered pricing, installment payments, payment timing, and discounts.
The combined solution of SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management also paves the way for Roche to evolve its customer-centric organization while gaining a more complete view of customer financials and customer rights.
Product Manager, Subscribe to Retire Digital Products, F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd
Taking customer experience to the next level
From what started out as a project enabling back-office capability, SMP is now becoming an enabler for Roche’s digital business. Plans are in place to integrate SMP with customer-facing applications to offer front-office capabilities to sales teams and provide self-service functionality for customers and partners.
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Featured partner
Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps businesses, governments, and other organizations build and optimize their digital operations, accelerate revenue growth, and enhance citizen services. With proven experience working with SAP Subscription Billing and SAP Entitlement Management, it helped integrate the solutions into Roche’s existing IT landscape to ensure there is one source of truth underpinning the order-to-cash process for Roche’s digital offerings.