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A global specialty pharmaceutical company is digitally transforming how it manages business transactions with wholesale distributors and contract manufacturing organizations (CMOs).
The company relied heavily on point-to-point integrations that required separate configurations for individual trading partners. This approach made it difficult to scale digital business transactions across the partner network, while manual coordination and reconciliation limited visibility across commercial and supply processes.
To address these challenges, the manufacturer selected TraceLink to link the company’s ERP system with trading partners through the TraceLink Network. TraceLink will support the exchange, transformation, and validation of business transactions, enabling interoperability with trading partners while the ERP system remains the system of record.
The initial implementation focuses on two areas:
- Wholesaler Order-to-Cash: Digitalizing commercial transactions with wholesalers, from purchase orders and acknowledgments through shipping, invoicing, chargebacks, product activity, resale reporting, forecasts, returns, and adjustments.
- CMO Procure-to-Pay: Digitalizing procurement and manufacturing transactions with CMOs, including forecasts, purchase orders and acknowledgments, shipments, invoices, remittances, returns, and batch-related transactions.
This approach will enable the specialty pharmaceutical company to scale digital business transactions across the partner network without building and maintaining separate point-to-point integrations for every trading partner.
An Integrate-Once™ Model Across Wholesalers and CMOs
With TraceLink’s Integrate-Once™ Model, the manufacturer can integrate each business transaction type once and exchange it across multiple wholesalers and CMOs, rather than building and maintaining separate point-to-point integrations for every trading partner. TraceLink MINT will standardize, validate, and exchange these business transactions while supporting different partner requirements and integration methods.
Scalable Digital Transactions Across the Partner Network
TraceLink will support a broad range of Order-to-Cash business transactions with wholesalers and Procure-to-Pay business transactions with CMOs. This approach will provide greater visibility into commercial and supply activity while allowing the manufacturer to scale digital business transactions across partners with different business needs.
Flexible Partner Interoperability
Trading partners can participate through EDI, API, SFTP, email-to-EDI transformation, or the MINT user interface. This flexibility allows the manufacturer to exchange digital business transactions with partners regardless of their preferred technology, integration method, or level of digital maturity.
Collaborative Multienterprise Processes
TraceLink POET will enable the manufacturer to create collaborative processes that extend beyond business transaction exchange and coordinate work among internal teams and trading partners. These processes can support activities such as reconciliation, exception handling, partner coordination, and follow-up, helping reduce reliance on email, spreadsheets, and other manual processes.
From Digital Transactions to Agentic Business Processes
Digitalizing Order-to-Cash and Procure-to-Pay business transactions does more than improve visibility across wholesalers and CMOs. It establishes the trusted operational context needed for future Agentic Business Processes by bringing together real-time information from orders, shipments, invoices, forecasts, partner activity, process status, and other business events.
With this foundation in place, the manufacturer can ultimately introduce governed OPUS Agents to perform specialized operational work alongside human teams. Within Agentic Business Processes, humans and OPUS Agents can use shared objectives, rules, permissions, and real-time business information to identify issues, coordinate decisions, resolve exceptions, and perform approved work across the partner network.
Expected Business Impact
The implementation is expected to deliver value across three key areas:
Reduce Manual Partner Coordination
Digital transaction exchange will reduce reliance on email, spreadsheets, manual reconciliation, and partner-by-partner follow-up across wholesaler and CMO processes.
Improve Business and Financial Visibility
More timely business transaction data will provide greater visibility into demand, product and resale activity, chargebacks, invoices, shipments, and related financial information.
Scale Digital Operations Across Trading Partners
A standardized approach to digital business transactions will allow the manufacturer to work more efficiently across a growing number of wholesalers and CMOs.
Together, these improvements are expected to strengthen partner engagement and collaboration while supporting the following target outcomes:
- 30 wholesalers linked through a single integration
- 60% faster partner onboarding
- A single source of truth for the pharmaceutical company and wholesalers
Ready to Build the Foundation for Agentic Business Processes?
TraceLink helps life sciences and healthcare companies digitalize supply chain operations and build the foundation for the Agentic Supply Chain Operating Model—bringing together people, processes, enterprise systems, and governed OPUS Agents to improve performance throughout global supply networks.
