When All is Not What it Seems

When a publicly traded, high-growth biotech company reached out to RGP they were at an inflection point. Though its revenue was only around $350 million, the company was scaling like a much larger organization, investing ahead of growth and building toward the future. But behind that growth was a growing strain. Internally, teams were manually piecing together critical supply chain data, including inventory, batch status, and cost of goods.

At first, the engagement followed a familiar path. “We got a call from the Chief Accounting Officer,” RGP’s Supply Chain Practice Leader, Jessica Harris recalled. “She was frustrated that the IT organization wasn’t making progress on what she saw as a necessary system selection.

Jessica and team began gathering requirements and evaluating systems, “We spent time with teams at the biotech company across finance, supply chain, and IT,” said Jessica “Ultimately, we developed a comprehensive ERP solution that would bring structure, integration, and scalability.”

“The head of supply chain said, ‘This is great—you can implement it,’” Jessica added.

“But then she came back to us and said, ‘We’re not going to use it. We’re not ready for it.’

The team found itself in a situation where there was true misalignment at the leadership level about what was needed and what was possible. Rather than pushing forward, Jessica and team paused.

With the support of a trusted relationship, particularly with the Chief Accounting Officer who had worked with Jessica’s team across multiple companies, the RGP team was able to step back with the client and reframe the problem.

“We realized that this company really wasn’t ready. Not yet. What they needed was clarity and a shared view into what was working and what wasn’t,” said Jessica. “We shifted the work toward showing them how their supply chain operated, by mapping the flow of inventory across external partners and revealing levels of complexity and inconsistency.”

Data arrived from more than a dozen manufacturers in different formats, with different definitions, and no common structure. Multiple teams relied on it, but no one shared a single version of the truth.

From there, the work evolved into building the strong foundation the business was missing. Jessica’s team designed a centralized data environment that could ingest information from every external vendor, regardless of how it was delivered, and standardize it into a consistent model. The approach was intentionally flexible, allowing vendors to provide data in multiple ways while ensuring the output was structured and usable.

On top of that foundation, her team developed role-specific dashboards that gave finance, supply chain, and eventually other teams access to the same trusted data.

For the first time, the biotech company could see its operations end-to-end in a coherent way. They had one source of truth.

“They want to solve the world’s problems with AI,” Jessica said. “And this is the step that can help get them there; it demonstrates how much teaming with a client, having patience and really listening to them matters.”

Today, the biotech company is operating with a centralized, structured data foundation with consistent decision-making. Just as importantly, they are now ready to take the next steps with ERP, and the work the team initially did will be utilized.