Epredia Customer Story
How Epredia Transformed Sales and Service Documentation across 94 countries
94
Countries where Epredia solutions are distributed
Significant time reduction in testing scenarios before implementing changes
Significant reduction in average time to deliver a change request
Epredia, part of the PHC Group, is a global leader in cancer diagnosis solutions.
With manufacturing facilities in the US, UK, China, France and Italy, the Operating across 94 countries, the company distributes precision instruments, consumables, and allied products to pathology laboratories in 94 countries across the Epredia distribution chain.
Opportunity
Replacing Complexity with Simplicity
Epredia’s billing and sales order documentation is essential to its customer interactions. Moving stock across international borders involves meeting many country-specific and customer-specific requirements on commercial invoices, with the need to make regular changes. Due to the many different countries and the range of products involved (batches, serial numbers, etc.) the documentation outputs can be highly complex. In September 2020, Epredia went live with a solution that used one static template to serve documentation needs across the regions. This included commercial invoices, customer invoices and the service invoice for service contracts.
Using the static template required the management of a parameter table with 1,326 entries to control billing outputs. Regional variations, discounts and freight charges generated a series of complications that could be challenging to support. This approach limited flexibility and the speed of changes.
“Changes to documents meant every scenario had to be tested,” recalls Dario Fernancez, Senior Staff Business Analyst, Epredia. “Timing and negotiation between departments became a large part of managing the process. We had nearly 200 different testing scenarios for the business.”
Together, these complex requirements meant even simple updates significantly increased the likelihood of error and held back the delivery of essential changes required by the business.
To tackle these challenges, Epredia selected Arch as their collaboration partner to overhaul the company’s output process and deliver billing and sales documentation using a flexible, scalable and robust solution.
Solution
Varo and Floe : An end-to-end transformation
Epredia embarked on a to Varo and Floe, Arch’s SAP-integrated output products. Using this solution, purpose-built templates for commercial and customer invoices were created. The new output approach focused on region-specific deliverables for the US and EMEA/APAC markets.
The team created templates and added custom logic at the output level for improved flexibility. Advanced search and reporting functionality was implemented through index fields.
“In my new role as manager of the commercial back office in Europe, I am a customer of the project. My team uses all the forms and emails. Before the project, our customers received documentation of up to 25 pages. This meant a lot of detailed checking. Since the project has gone live with Varo and Floe, we have been able to reduce the number of lines down to 1 or 2 pages, while still including a lot of information. Varo allows us flexibility by providing different information for US or Europe based templates, especially on our Commercial invoice. From a customer perspective, it has sped up their review time and we have had a number of customers compliment us on the new forms, the look and feel of them.“
Kate Adcock
EMEA Customer Service Manager, Epredia
Creating a partnership that delivered
Arch delivered comprehensive design along with detailed training, support, and hands-on guidance from the outset, throughout implementation and during hypercare.
“Arch trained us, answered all our questions in detail, and helped with the first invoice template, We were able to start creating documentation on our own. Each time we had a question, we received quick replies. For complex topics, they would jump on a call and walk us through everything.”
Dario Fernadez
Senior SAP Analyst, Epredia
In this way, the Epredia team built expertise in the Arch solution, and became self-sufficient. The internal team has used the solution to build additional invoices, quotations and order confirmation templates.
Navigating a Complex Go-Live
With hundreds of in-progress orders using the previous pricing procedure during go-live, Epredia implemented a smart SAP enhancement, which automatically checked which pricing procedure applied to each order and switched between the old and new frameworks seamlessly, ensuring business continuity without disruption in a complex go-live environment.
Impact
Efficiency Unleashed
This technology transformation created efficiencies across all areas of the business, improving the speed of making changes along with a reduction of risk and support for a wider variety of business scenarios.
Through 2025, Epredia worked on finalising documents, followed by an organisation-wide go-live across all regions.
“Our customer team now has ownership of their master data, and using the Varo and Floe dashboard, they are able to see the invoice layout and email details before and after sending to the customer. We are also using the dashboard for verifying master data. The design of the forms is still evolving. With Varo and Floe, we have removed vulnerabilities and introduced flexibility to make ongoing changes.”
Kate Adcock
EMEA Customer Service Manager, Epredia
Building on the foundation of Varo & Floe templates, Epredia has experienced far-reaching organisational benefits:
- Faster changes: New requirements are now implemented quickly and with confidence
- Reduced risk: Regional changes no longer impact other customers or documents
- Simplified testing: UAT now focuses only on specific regions and document types
- Professional communications: Modern Floe templates deliver emails across 6 languages with robust regional formatting and custom logic
- Marketing opportunities: Built-in links and banners showcase new products and events targeting customers with specific messages in relevant channels
“”For IT, it has made it so much easier to make changes. “We’re still doing enhancements, but now it takes less time and it’s easier to understand where something needs to be changed or added. Embedded user-exits give us an advantage in delivering solutions to our business faster.”
Dario Fernadez
Senior SAP Analyst, Epredia
The Bottom Line
With the simplicity of Varo and Floe, Epredia has transformed billing and sales documentation into a competitive advantage – delivering high quality customer service while empowering their teams to move fast and with confidence.
