During the kick-off meeting at ZESAR GmbH (Central Office for the Billing of Pharmaceuticals) on 7th February 2011 in Cologne, the Director Christian Hälke, presented the business model and the newly established organisation to private insurance companies. ZESAR was established in January 2011 and is a centralized billing centre for the Association of Private Insurers and Benefit Agencies. Supported by a collections system, ZESAR deducts a discount from pharmaceutical manufacturers and forwards it onto the beneficiary.

The SAP software module FI-CA is to be used for the billing processes. In November 2010 an RFP (request for quotation) was issued for the implementation of the basic customizing of the SAP module. The most important aspect was to find a cost efficient solution, which protected the interests of the insurance companies and benefit agencies. For the RFP process all the established IT Consulting Companies were requested to tender their offer. ConVista Consulting managed to win the contract with their proposal.

During the kick-off meeting ConVista representatives presented the project methodology and their strategy for ensuring the legal requirements could be implemented in time. “With this project ZESAR and ConVista are aiming to automate the whole process as much as possible. The objective is to achieve a user friendly system for clarification activities to minimize manual processes,” explained Gert Kollasch, Technical Manager at ConVista Consulting, who is part of the project team.

As part of the proposal, ConVista provided a newly developed reference model specifically for the required billing system.

This new model was based on the existing “ConVista Reference Model Payment Processes” and was adapted using a combination of technical solutions and methods from numerous other projects to produce the “ConVista Reference Model for Trustee Discounting.”

This model serves as a basis for the requirements of those business cases, to be implemented and supports the communication between business departments and application development. It also serves as a basis for implementing the Extreme Programming (XP) approach, which allows an implementation of the first release within two months. ConVista supported various areas of the project throughout the project, from requirements analysis and process design to the technical implementation of the SAP modules for payment processes (FI-CA), Financials (FI) and Asset Management (FI-AA), including the interfaces. ConVista also took on the technical project management and supported the set up of the SAP architecture.

At the beginning of this year the team commenced work. Based on a tight roll-out plan, the first release will be going into production on 1st March, the second release will go live in May and the third release in July 2011. “Both the internal and external members of the team are very well prepared and equipped to achieve the required process automation, in line with the tight deadlines in the project plan,” states Dominic Testrut, ConVista Consulting.