AstraZeneca is one of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies, with a broad range of medicines designed to fight disease in important areas of healthcare. Active in over 100 countries with growing presence in important emerging markets; corporate office in London UK; major R&D sites in Sweden, the UK and the US.

AstraZeneca have over 67,000 employees (55% in Europe, 30% in the Americas and 15% Asia, Africa and Australasia). Sales in 2007 totalled $29.6 billion, with an operating profit of $9 billion. R&D spend in 2007 totalled more than $5 billion. AstraZeneca has around 13,000 employees at 17

principal R&D centres in 8 countries.

One way for large organisations to save considerable sums of money, as much as multi-millions, is by optimizing their telephony

administration. AstraZeneca has proved this to be true. With Teleopti’s solution for Telecom Expense Management, Teleopti Pro, they analyzed their corporate telecom usage and management processes and been able to reduce their administrative costs by 1.4 M Euros annually.

Further savings were made when managed the number of extensions they were using downwards from 22,000 to 18,000.

“We used to have to deal with 30,000 invoices for mobile usage every year. Today we have just one file each month which is automatically imported,” says Anders Wikström, Telecom Director at AstraZeneca.

The tool that helped AstraZeneca to decrease their telecom expense management is called Teleopti Pro. “Six year ago we implemented Teleopti Pro with a focus to get in control of our telephony,” Wikström continues. “Over subsequent years further benefits of using the

solution were identified. For example we found that AstraZeneca had many extensions which were unused. In total we eliminated 4,000 redundant extensions which led to savings of more than 200,000 Euros.”

“I do not have the exact number here, but it is a small percentage

of the savings which we have made. However, it is important to point out that it is not only the system that has identified these savings. It has required a lot of dedicated work from AstraZeneca to make it work.”

“There are no specific disadvantages. Sometimes the processing

time can be long but it is manageable. I find the system stable, with a simple user interface. It integrates well with our other systems. You could say that Teleopti Pro provides a combination of benefits of a Business Intelligence system and an ERP-system.”

It is possible to log all calls in order to identify the people and departments with the highest telephony costs. This 

data can also be used to calculate which mobile operator

has the best rates. “Call records with costs are imported

directly from the mobile service providers,” says Anders

Kalmerström, Marketing Director at Teleopti AB.

The call records can also be used to separate private use

from work-related use of company mobiles. “For example we had a customer who had problems with employees using the phone to pay for public transportation or adverts on the internet. Today their employees can use their mobile as much as they like privately. The costs for private use will be deducted from their pay-cheque,” says Anders Kalmerström.