Building a complete revenue recognition cycle to spur growth at Alcami

As a contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO), Alcami deals with a lot of contracts. At any given time, these contracts vary in value—there is the initial awarded contract value, the amount “in process,” or the percentage of work that Alcami has scheduled to complete, and the invoiced value, or the total value of all completed work that can now be counted as revenue.

These varying contract values are stored across two different systems: an ERP (Microsoft AX) and a CRM (Salesforce). In order to calculate the time between an awarded contract, a scheduled contract, or an invoiced contract, Alcami had no other option but to check between the two systems.

Manually cross-referencing 1000+ contracts at any given time was slow and ineffective. Of the many different types of services that Alcami provides, the team could only analyze a small subset of their contracts. This left the team in the dark when trying to answer key questions like “What type of service contract are we completing the fastest?” or “How should we orient our sales strategy to maximize revenue?” There was a clear loss of clarity in revenue and business operations—Alcami needed a better solution.

Alcami knew exactly what needed to be done—connect its ERP and CRM. They just needed the right technology for the job. A quick Workato demo showed the team exactly how a recipe could be used to link the two platforms and, with this “seemingly out-of-the-box solution,” Alcami was sold.

Now, Workato provides insights while Alcami employees sleep. Every night, a Workato recipe delivers an update as to how much of the contract opportunity has been invoiced vs. how much of it has been planned in the ERP through various networks—in other words, Workato delivers an overall revenue recognition cycle.

Thanks to Workato’s nightly updates, Alcami now has the clarity to accurately evaluate its service performance. At any given moment, Alcami now knows exactly how much time has passed between an awarded contract and a scheduled or invoiced contract, whereas before it could only analyze a small percentage of these contracts.

Understanding how quickly work can be executed has given Alcami a better understanding of how its resources should be allocated and has served as the foundation for a new market strategy in approaching contracting for certain services.

Plus, since deploying Workato for revenue recognition, Alcami has expanded its use of automation by consolidating sales ops information for their lab testing side of the business within its CRM. As Alcami grows, the eventual vision is to bring in Workato into all aspects of the business.