Case Study: Systagenix Wound Management

Case Study Systagenix Wound Management

Company Profile
A newly formed organization selling products in 100+ countries worldwide. More than 400,000 sales and purchase transactions in the first year. A new ERP system implementation underway. A tax department of one with no local tax expertise or resources. No best- practice tax processes in place. No taxability rules established. This was the situation faced by Systagenix Wound Management as they created a new company structure through a divestment from global healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson®. Systagenix had all the complexity of a large business but the limited resources of a small startup.

The Challenge
Managing indirect tax for this new organization presents a complex set of challenges. In addition to the obvious goal of minimizing risk and penalties for non-compliance, there’s a number of issues unique to companies like Systagenix who are operating in (or expanding into) multiple markets.
• How to maintain expertise on various country-specific tax regimes?
• How to stay on top of ever-increasing changes in tax rules and rates?
• How to handle local tax authority scrutiny and information requests?
• How to maintain staff expertise and training?
• How to proactively manage tax enterprise-wide in an environment of business change and growth?
• How to access the right data to make key business decisions?

Gareth Scanlon, Group Tax Director at Systagenix, summarized the situation, “With no local resources in the regions, our tax department was faced with tracking sales tax in the US, monitoring VAT changes in the European Union, and understanding import and excise taxes in South Africa. We needed a partner that could manage globally all of the rules, regulations, and updates. And automate the calculations.”

Of equal, if not greater, importance to Systagenix was access to data. They wanted a solution where they could manage the controls on tax data and, in real time, get the detail-level and summary-level data they needed for day-to-day decision making as well as for strategic planning.

“Automation was the key,” says Scanlon. “We needed to de-risk transaction tax decisions throughout the supply chain. We wanted to ensure accuracy, improve processes, and provide better data for decision-making. And we wanted a central, automated point of control.”