Case Study: Leading Drugstore Company achieves higher efficiency and significant savings with GEP SMART

Leading Drugstore Chain Drives Higher Efficiency and Savings With Smart by GEP

A leading U.S. drugstore chain with more than 4,500 stores and roughly 85,000 employees faced highly decentralized, manual procurement across multiple systems, resulting in poor spend visibility, low spend under management (<20%), long payment approval cycles (>30 days) and limited capture of early payment discounts. The company sought a unified, automated procurement platform to boost productivity, compliance, savings and control over indirect spend.

The chain implemented GEP SMART’s procure-to-pay and contract management modules in under eight months, using cloud-based infrastructure, supplier portal connectivity, rule-based approvals and invoice auto-matching. Post-implementation results included >90% spend under management, >90% invoices entered via the portal, payment approval cycles cut to <5 days, higher early-payment discount capture, improved visibility and reporting, increased user adoption (300+ users) and stronger controls and compliance.