Medical devices
Pellegrin Médical
A device maker wrote its approval policy once and stopped chasing signatures by phone.
Group
14 entities · 10 banks · 6 currencies
Country
France
Backtest
Inside range · error 2.4 %
The setup
Pellegrin Médical designs and manufactures implants and surgical instruments in Lyon, Basel, Dublin and Penang, and sells in more than forty countries through fourteen legal entities. Regulated products mean regulated processes, and Hélène Marchetti’s finance team is audited on how it pays as much as on what it pays.
Until last year the payment approval policy was a twelve-page document, and the practice was a chain of emails and phone calls. A supplier batch could sit for hours waiting for the right person, and a missed second signature only surfaced afterwards.
Backtest · forecast vs actual · 13 weeks
2 → 1.3 h
Average time to release a supplier batch, from preparation to bank file
CHF 1,094,276
Of payments routed to the right approver on the first attempt
41 rules
Written as sentences, replacing a 12-page procedure
“
The auditors read our approval policy in Headroom the way they would read a procedure, except that this one is also what actually runs.
Hélène Marchetti
Deputy CFO
What changed
Pellegrin rebuilt the policy in Headroom as 41 rules, each written as a sentence: payments above €50,000 need two approvers, new beneficiaries need the treasurer, anything outside business hours waits. Roles follow the entity and the amount, and the same person cannot prepare and approve one payment. The bank file is only produced once the chain is complete.
Releasing a supplier batch now takes 1.3 hours instead of two, and CHF 1,094,276 of payments in the first quarter went to the right approver on the first attempt. The auditors asked to see the rules and the log; both fit on one screen, and the log can be exported as a file.
Other stories
