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Case study · Top-10 global pharma

How a top-10 pharma turned a $6M contracting failure into a +9% margin engine in 12 months.

65%
Of global revenue routed through contracting. The four-year program built to industrialize it had stalled at 50 of 80 countries, and lost the trust of the people who used it.
Vamstar × Top-10 Pharma (anonymized) Engagement: 12 months Published Jun 2025
73%

Contracting process-efficiency boost

17%

Win-rate increase across deployed markets

9%

Margin expansion on contract revenue

2wk

From engagement to live PoC in country one

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

50

Went live on poor data

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)

With a failed internal program behind them, the team made one more call.

What they wanted was specific. Someone who could land a working answer inside the systems they already owned. Quickly.

What Vamstar did

Three commitments, proven before any contract was signed.

01 · Approach

Listen first, code second.

Vamstar’s Forward Deployed Engineers spent the first phase with local commercial teams in market, not with the central program office. The goal was to map the workflow contracts actually moved through, the data sources teams genuinely relied on, and the decision points where the system would either earn its place or be ignored.

Forward Deployed Engineering →
02 · Architecture

Build inside what they already owned.

No new platform. No parallel login. The Data Orchestration Engine and Pricing Co-Pilot were embedded directly into the existing Salesforce environment, so local users kept working in the CRM they already knew. Training stayed minimal. Adoption stopped being a fight.

Explore Polaris →
03 · Intelligence

Pricing logic that reasons in context.

The Pricing Co-Pilot was trained on pharma contract award data, competitor positioning and market signals, then tuned to the company’s portfolio. It surfaced a recommended strategy per opportunity, with the evidence to defend it. Local teams stopped guessing. Central pricing stopped second-guessing.

Explore Pricing Co-Pilot →
The delivery rhythm

12 months. 25 markets. One running answer.

A staged rollout, small enough to be safe, fast enough to be felt. Each phase locked in the next.

Week 0–2

PoC

Working answer in one market.

Vamstar FDEs landed in country one. The Data Orchestration Engine was wired into the existing Salesforce instance. A live, defensible pricing recommendation was running inside the CRM by the end of week two.

Month 1–3

Stabilize

Country one proves the model.

Data flow held. Local team adoption climbed. Pricing logic was tuned against live contract outcomes. The model produced an answer the country head was willing to defend to headquarters, and one headquarters could read.

Month 3–6

Scale, wave 1

First high-impact markets go live.

Ten further markets rolled onto the platform. Because deployment sat inside Salesforce, training was hours, not weeks. Win-rate and cycle-time deltas started showing up in the regional KPI pack within the quarter.

Month 6–12

Scale, wave 2

25 markets, 86% adoption.

The remaining priority markets came online. Local-team adoption reached 86%. Process efficiency, win rate, margin and pipeline visibility moved together, the four metrics the original program had failed to shift in four years.

The payoff

A working contracting engine, and the discipline to scale it.

Twelve months in, the metrics that mattered moved together: efficiency, win rate, margin, adoption.

73%
Contracting process-efficiency boost

Time-to-bid collapsed across the 25 deployed markets. Headquarters could see the pipeline. Local teams stopped re-keying data into a system that had not been reading them back.

17%
Win-rate increase across deployed markets

Pricing recommendations carried evidence. Bid preparation moved from days to hours. The lift compounded across high-frequency contracting markets where small bid-quality gains showed up fast.

9%
Margin expansion on contract revenue

The Pricing Co-Pilot identified where to bid sharper to win, and where to hold price because the market supported it. Discounting discipline tightened without losing share.

86%
Local-team adoption in 12 months

Adoption is the metric that exposes platform design. 86% of local users running the new workflow inside Salesforce is what made every other outcome durable.

In their words
“It’s the first time in this company’s history that contracting felt like a system we owned, not a problem we managed.”
Head of Commercial Excellence Top-10 global pharmaceutical (role and identity anonymized)
The Vamstar stack behind this

Polaris, the operating system for global contracting.

Three components, deployed together, inside the systems they already owned.

Data Orchestration Engine

LIVE, HARMONIZED SUPPLY-AND-DEMAND INTELLIGENCE

Pulls signal from contract boards, pricing benchmarks and competitor activity, deduplicates and harmonizes it across markets, and lands it inside the CRM as a native data layer.

Explore Data Orchestration →

Pricing AI · Co-Pilot

CONTRACT-AWARE PRICING RECOMMENDATIONS

Trained on pharma award data and competitor positioning. Recommends bid strategy per opportunity with the supporting evidence, so commercial teams move from interpretation to action.

Explore Pricing AI →

Contract [RFx] AI · Salesforce-native

THE WORKFLOW INSIDE THE CRM

Embeds contract intelligence and bid preparation into Salesforce. No new login, no parallel system. Local teams keep working where they already work, and adoption stops being a battle.

Explore Contract [RFx] AI →
Want this for your contracting engine?

Two weeks to a working answer. Twelve months to scale.

Vamstar deploys forward-deployed engineers inside the systems you already own. No new platform. No four-year programs. Talk to us about a proof of concept in one market.