The starting line
Contracting carried 65% of revenue, and the system meant to industrialize it had failed.
Across 165 markets, this top-10 pharma’s commercial engine ran on a single workflow: contracts. They drove most of the company’s revenue and almost all of its competitive intensity. The leadership team knew it. They had been trying to industrialize it for four years.
They had done what every Fortune 100 does. A central platform program. A $6M budget. Eighty countries outsourced to data vendors. The intent was a single source of truth for contracting, harmonized across every region. The result was the opposite. Data was inconsistent. Records duplicated. Local teams stopped trusting what the system said. After four years, 50 of 80 countries were nominally live on data nobody could rely on, and 30 countries were still unfinished. Win rates had not moved.
The question was no longer whether contracting needed transformation. It was whether transformation was still possible after a four-year program had drained the budget, the time, and most of the credibility the team had to work with.
$6M
Spent on the internal program
4 yrs
Timeline before Vamstar
80
Countries outsourced to data vendors
Local teams, burnt out on manual data entry into a system that gave them nothing back, had quietly stopped using it. Headquarters could not see the pipeline, because the pipeline was being run in spreadsheets the platform did not know about. Four years in, the program had eroded confidence in the very workflow it was supposed to industrialize.
We had lost trust in the system before it was finished. Every time a contract came in, the team treated it like a one-off.
— Head of Commercial Excellence (role anonymized)