Pharmgate Animal Health partners with farmers and veterinarians on animal wellness. Their innovative products have been helping improve animals’ lives over the past 12 years. With products sold directly and through a network of distributors, Pharmgate has expanded globally to include 4 manufacturing sites, 4 R&D sites and customers on nearly every continent.

Even with increasing product adoption, a strong pipeline of new products and good financial stability, the Pharmgate leadership team knew they could do better. Pharmgate Director Martin Gray, along with CFO Peter Criddle, were determined to change the game on improving visibility into their company’s performance.

After the first call with Nowsight, Peter and Martin knew they’d found a truly innovative solution which blended exceptional entrepreneurial execution with robust software technology. Not only did CEO Michael Schader and the Nowsight team have the ability to connect all of Pharmgate’s systems together, the combination of BI (Business Intelligence) and AI (Artificial Intelligence) was going to deliver insights the team didn’t think was possible.

“From the first meeting, it was clear the Pharmgate team was ready to not just create a single source of truth from their data, but to make the cultural changes that would ensure everyone used that data to improve the business,” said Michael Schader, Nowsight CEO.

To track the sale of their veterinary pharmaceuticals via distributors across the US, Pharmgate had built an “it’s not great, but it mostly works” model of spreadsheet reporting. At the end of each month, each distributor would send a spreadsheet to report on their sales but reports weren’t standardized in format or content. Finance leadership would then consolidate each report into a master spreadsheet, normalizing the data as they entered it and determining rebates for each distributor. This highly manual and time-consuming process also required the use of manually created VLOOKUPS and Pivot tables to roll-up data across distributors to get a market-facing view. When Territory Managers needed per-account reports or customized views, finance was tasked with delivering those throughout the month too. In addition, to see historical performance, previous emails and spreadsheets needed to be saved, found and accessed.

These monthly distributor reports only showed the amount of inventory each distributor was taking—so it lacked actual insights into the market. Without a holistic view across the distributor network, what was really happening? Was a distributor replacing inventory after a significant end user purchase? Were monthly sales of products just plugging along across all end user accounts? Were the purchases this month in-line with prior periods?

Gray said, “We have account managers that take an iPad into a distributor, pull up the dashboard and use it as a conversation starter. Instead of taking orders, they are developing deep relationships—understanding the client’s trends, their end users, and more.” This not only helps Pharmgate, but it helps the distributor see how we are tracking their sales and how that correlates to discounts.

Sales leadership now has a clear picture on where to focus their teams. If an account did 200k last month, and this month did 180k—that never used to raise any flags. But now, with the Nowsight solution, Pharmgate can see the context around those orders. Maybe they’ve been trending downward for 12+ months—not significantly, but enough that we now need to re-look at their discount level. Or if the product mix shifted within an account, we can now catch that and find out why.

“It’s amazing that just having better insight into sales, with all the context that Nowsight provides, has helped so many aspects of the business,” said Gray. “The marketing team now has front-line information to help them develop campaigns and the product team is able to see seasonality and market drivers in a way that’s positively impacted our development cycle.”

Pharmgate still receives a report from each distributor every month. Nowsight has taken 10s of hours every month out of the process of harmonizing disparate spreadsheets with a simple, unified ingestion engine that ensures data is consistent and reliable.

“Everyone seeing the same, undisputable data has also improved communication channels,” said Gray. “Customer service no longer has to pull per-client reports, reps and leadership all see the exact sales numbers so there is complete alignment from the sales VP, to sales reps, to finance, to leadership.”

In a second phase initiative, Pharmgate tasked Nowsight to tap into their SAP-housed data to provide a consolidated global view of revenue, distribution accounts, direct-sale accounts, product line performance and segment performance. This business intelligence provides a more comprehensive and strategic level of information. Instead of focusing on gaps in reporting, the leadership team now met to have insightful discussions about how best to meet business objectives and further accelerate growth.

Pharmgate now has a view across all their organizations, regions and customers. Four P&Ls are now consolidated in a single view in a single currency. And because the Nowsight solution is always-on and always up-to-date, the team in Asia can access information while the team in the US is still asleep (and vice versa).

During implementation, Nowsight built the company’s KPIs directly into the leadership dashboard. “It’s changed the way leadership meetings run,” said Martin. “It’s now about factual conversations that are data-driven, rather than having to circle-back with additional data or hypothesize about the reason.

Aside from the hundreds of hours saved every month by not data jockeying spreadsheets, the Pharmgate team can’t imagine going back to their old ways. “We’re increasing revenue by ensuring discounts are proportional to actual sales,” said Martin. He continues, “no one in sales or customer service wants to go back to hand-creating client or distributor reports. And Marketing loves seeing untapped markets for existing products while operations can better predict inventory levels and demand.”

“We weren’t looking for absolute perfection, but we needed to ensure absolute accuracy. Every check and balance we’ve run proves our Nowsight dashboard is #1 accurate, #2 easy-to-use and #3 scalable, and the ultimate benefit is that it’s helping us grow and people can focus on where they add value” said Gray.

“The real benefit of the Nowsight solutions is how we can focus on growing the business and not constantly look backward at how we’ve performed in the past,” said Colin Gray, President & CEO. “The leadership team has never been more aligned across functions and geographies.”