Automating Digital Product Usage Collection and Billing to Eliminate Manual Finance Intervention
Case Study · Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
Automating Digital Product Usage Collection and Billing to Eliminate Manual Finance Intervention
Industry
Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals
Size
~100,000 employees
Region
Global
Monetization Model
Subscription-Based
About Customer
Use case
Digital Product Usage Billing Automation & End-to-End Traceability
Transformation
Manual Usage Billing Processes → Automated Mediation Pipeline
Live since
January 2025
Company
A global leader in pharmaceuticals and diagnostics, headquartered in Switzerland, with approximately 100,000 employees across more than 100 countries. Historically built on the delivery of physical diagnostics hardware and pharmaceutical products, the company is undergoing a strategic transformation — shifting from hardware and diagnostics delivery toward subscription-based digital healthcare services. Many of these new digital products carry a usage-based billing component, and with volumes expected to double year over year, the operational infrastructure needed to match that ambition.
Situation
As the company’s digital product portfolio began to grow, the back-office processes behind it did not keep pace. Usage records from digital healthcare products were collected and processed manually — extracted from the Snowflake data platform, verified by finance teams, corrected where needed, and then uploaded into SAP Subscription Billing by hand. Every step in the flow required human intervention. The finance team carried the burden of verifications, corrections, and general processing for each monthly billing cycle. With digital product volumes on a trajectory to double every year, the organization recognized that this architecture could not scale. Adding headcount was not a viable answer — automation was the only path forward.
Challenges
- Fully manual usage billing back-office — from collecting records in Snowflake to uploading them into SAP Subscription Billing, every step required direct finance team involvement, creating a fragile, labor intensive monthly process.
- No scalable path for digital product growth — with usage volumes expected to double annually, the manual process represented an existential bottleneck for the company’s digital subscription ambitions.
- No built-in controls or traceability — the manual flow lacked systematic validation, duplication detection, and end-to-end auditability from source record to billing entry, creating financial risk and compliance exposure.
- Generic integration tools evaluated and rejected — the company concluded that an iPaaS or CPI tool could not meet the data handling requirements: stateless pipes cannot apply business rules, manage flow control, or maintain the audit trail required for finance-grade usage billing.
“IPaaS / CPI is just a Pipe. If you need to do anything for the data, you need a tool which is built for purpose → Mediation tool → CM-CE.”
– IT Architecture Assessment · Global Pharmaceutical & Diagnostics Leader
Why DigitalRoute
Manual billing back-office replaced with an automated, finance-grade mediation pipeline
The company evaluated generic integration platforms and found them structurally inadequate for usage billing. The distinction is fundamental: integration tools are stateless and cannot apply business rules, manage duplicate detection, or provide the flow control and audit trail that finance-grade usage billing requires. UsageCloud was purpose-built for exactly this problem.
- Built-in validation and business rule execution. UsageCloud™ applied customer-specific business rules, completeness checks, and data validations at the mediation layer — automatically routing error records to Snowflake for correction rather than surfacing them as finance team workload.
- Stateful deduplication at source. Duplicate usage records — which in a manual process would pass silently to billing — were detected and quarantined within the pipeline before reaching SAP Subscription Billing, eliminating a direct source of billing inaccuracy.
- Full end-to-end traceability. Every usage record is tracked from its Snowflake source entry to its final SAP SB billing entry, with automated status reporting back to Snowflake — giving finance teams a complete audit trail without manual reconciliation work.
The Solution
Automated usage mediation layer between Snowflake digital product data and SAP Subscription Billing
UsageCloud™ was deployed as the central mediation platform — replacing the manual finance-led billing process end to end. On a monthly cycle, digital product usage records are automatically extracted from Snowflake and ingested into the UsageCloud™ pipeline. Records pass through a structured sequence: completeness validation with customer-specific business rule application, deduplication detection with quarantine of rejected records, enrichment with additional context, and final mapping into the format required by SAP Subscription Billing.
At each quality gate, records that do not pass are automatically routed back to Snowflake — accompanied by status reports and archived error data — so that root causes can be addressed and records reprocessed without finance team intervention. Clean, validated billable usages are forwarded directly to SAP Subscription Billing for automated invoicing. The result is a fully automated, traceable, and auditable flow from usage event to billing entry, with human intervention required only for genuine exception resolution.
Phase 1 went live in January 2025, covering the initial set of digital products. The architecture is designed to onboard new digital products with minimal configuration overhead. Future evolution includes a standardized API to be shared across all business units, which will plug directly into the mediation layer — ensuring all usage data flows through UsageCloud™ and the standardized validation and business rule framework before reaching SAP Subscription Billing.
The Outcome
End-to-end
Auditability
Every usage record fully traceable from Snowflake source to SAP Subscription Billing entry — with automated error routing and status reporting replacing manual reconciliation.
Zero
Manual finance steps
End-to-end automation eliminated manual collection, verification, and upload into SAP SB — freeing the finance team from routine billing operations.
2×
Annual growth supported
Digital product volumes expected to double year on year — UsageCloud™ scales the billing back-office without adding headcount or process overhead.
The Architecture
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