Head of treasury operations and credit control
About the company:
The group of companies in Russia produces, imports, sells and registers medicines, most of which are on the list of vital drugs. We have been around for 30 years. Everyone in the company knows about the products we sell, market and manufacture, and promotes them themselves, because they are genuinely very good products. Our main areas in the pharmaceutical market are the gastrointestinal tract, the heart and the urinary system.
Services:
Yes, the decision to move to outsourcing was, shall we say, forced, because we faced a staffing shortage: the payroll accountant and the HR administrator went on maternity leave, and in November the chief accountant and the methodologist left. At one point two people remained out of a seven-person accounting team, and we realised that finding high-class specialists on the permanent labour market is difficult and expensive, and the easiest option was to go into outsourcing. We considered several companies in the tender. The finalists were presented to our Prague management, and your company was approved as the only provider that satisfied everyone on price, quality, market feedback and reputation.
At first we approached the companies we already work with on consulting, but we could not agree on price. Our director suggested UCMS Group; his colleagues, finance directors at other pharmaceutical companies, had recommended you, so UCMS Group was included in the tender. We looked at whether the experience was with international companies, not only Russian ones. We were won over by the fact that you are 1C experts, because that is our main working platform.
Everything was very fast and clear here, and the amendments during approval were also made very quickly. The hardest part, of course, was signing the first contract.
The main benefits are that we get work done well by professionals. UCMS Group employs specialists who immediately understand the essence of the task. As a side benefit, by outsourcing we immediately got an expert opinion on the business process we had built and saw its downsides. We understand where we are weak, where our bottlenecks are, and we try to deal with them with your help or on our own. For us that additional benefit is very significant.
If something does not work somewhere in the process, it often turns out that the problem lies in the way the business process is built, that some function is done by the wrong person or at the wrong time. Once that function is outsourced, it becomes clear.
The payroll project had the most difficult start, because that function was handed over completely turnkey, meaning that for a long time we had no one on our side who could oversee the process. On our side there were difficulties in providing access and powers of attorney in a way that did not violate our confidentiality policies. With the accounting services everything was fairly quick, the processes were already established. Organising the HR project took about a month.
It was difficult with payroll, because I do not understand those processes so well. Now our payroll accountant, who went on maternity leave, has come back to us for 8 hours a week, so every evening she joins and answers our questions and the questions of Svetlana Petrova (project manager), and in that way provides some support from the outside. The handover from her was very quick, and now she closes the gaps that she did not hand over at the time.
In accounting we have a hundred per cent match with Vera, Lyuba and Valya (Vera Steshova, project manager; Lyubov Lyapina, senior specialist on the project; Valentina Gavrilova, assistant). Here we have no problems at all, everything is very easy and smooth, and most importantly our director and the auditors gave a positive assessment of the quality of the reporting and the methodology. Objectively and subjectively we are satisfied, everything runs smoothly.
On payroll I remember the cases handled by Svetlana's team. We received a letter from the Social Insurance Fund; literally on the last day the injury rate for one of the companies was changed because our type of activity had changed. We missed that point, but the UCMS Group team resolved it on their own. We had no resources for it on our side, so you could say you saved us. In accounting, as part of the senior accountant function, we managed to take over the work from a departing employee in the shortest possible time, bring it together and not lose important information about the processes. I am grateful to the team for preserving everything and carrying on.
In the accounting services we see enormous proactivity. The colleagues raise issues themselves when they find inaccuracies or errors. We would like that from everyone.
During the pandemic there were no staff or salary cuts. We met the sales plan set by our head office. The only plan being implemented gradually is the consolidation of production in Russia. We plan to manufacture another drug at the plant near Moscow. Currently two drugs in different dosages are produced, and there will be three. The plans are to expand the production market in Russia, keep prices at the current level without raising them, and continue to grow and develop.
Some people here call you Yusiemes, but mostly we say "our outsourcer".
Honestly, I have no word other than "quality service providers", "quality contractors". I came from the IT business world, where everything is always outsourced. The associations that come to me are: quality, service, speed.
We are actually at a crossroads ourselves right now. Our accounting services are on a temporary contract. We need to decide whether to look for someone to hire or to hand the function over to outsourcing entirely and keep assistants in the office to scan and archive the source documents. If you do not come to this yourself, circumstances, the market or the economy will force you to. I am sure that in any case we will arrive at the idea that if a process can be outsourced, we will outsource it. My advice is to do it earlier. If you make the decision to move to outsourcing yourself, you simply have more time than when you are forced to do it unplanned.
