Customer Success Story
Avance Clinical furthers growth with enhanced financial visibility and forecasting from Certinia
Avance Clinical is an Australian-based Contract Research Organization (CRO) that specializes in conducting clinical trials for biotech companies worldwide. The company’s accelerated growth created gaps in visibility into project financial data, hampering forecasting accuracy, departmental accountability, and resource utilization. Avance Clinical took back control by implementing Certinia Professional Services (PS) Cloud and Financial Management (FM) Cloud—a move that drove significant improvements in operations and fueled the company’s ambitious growth.
Background
With business growth comes unexpected challenges
Avance Clinical is a leading CRO with an impressive 52% market share. The company is favored for its ability to deliver high-quality clinical research while reducing the time and cost of getting therapies to market.
As a CRO, Avance Clinical’s operations are highly regulated. Along with strict industry regulations, their internal workflows deal with complex financial relations involving various stakeholders (hospitals, pharmacies, etc.). As the organization grew, it became evident that there was a growing need for better utilization, financial tracking, and projected cost visibility—abilities its manual processes could no longer satisfy.
By implementing Certinia’s PS Cloud and FM Cloud, Avance Clinical aimed to enhance visibility into its financial data—which was key to improving forecasting and strategic business planning.
"The system not only strengthened our increasing demand for data visibility and timeliness but also offered broader enhancements across the organization, further positioning Avance Clinical for sustained growth and operational excellence.”
Ben Edwards
Chief Operating Officer, Avance Clinical
Challenge
Lack of timely, comprehensive financial insights leads to reactive planning
As Avance Clinical expanded globally, it outgrew its operational infrastructure consisting of manual processes. Its increasing need for timely and comprehensive visibility into project financial data became apparent due to these factors:
- Delays in accessing financial insights
Manual processes made it difficult to access financial data in real time. Without timely reports helping leadership evaluate business health and performance, decisions were often delayed. - Interdepartmental disconnects
Without a unified financial database, departments struggled to manage budgets efficiently. This, in turn, affected resource planning for projects. - Inaccurate forecasting
Lack of data visibility hindered future trend predictions. This made it harder to plan for upcoming projects, determine project budgets, and provide customers visibility into projected costs.
Lack of insights into resource requirements also hindered effective resource allocation and utilization.
Solution: Real-time data and analytics improve forecasting accuracy, departmental visibility, and resource utilization
Avance Clinical turned to Exceleris Consulting, a boutique consultancy specializing in customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) transformations. Being familiar with the CRO industry, Exceleris Consulting grasped Avance Clinical’s unique processes and recommended Certinia PS Cloud and FM Cloud as the best-fit solutions.
Enhanced financial visibility
Avance Clinical revolutionized its approach to financial data using Certinia PS Cloud and FM Cloud.
With Certinia, they took revenue snapshots and reviewed backlog data every first day of the month. This provided them with an accurate point-in-time view of their financial performance.
Optimized resource utilization
Empowered by deeper insights into their financial performance, department heads leveraged a bottom-up and top-down budgeting approach to manage budgets and effectively align with business goals.
Granular insights into projected resource requirements also enabled Avance Clinical to ensure that their customer projects are resourced at the right level and at the right time.
Greater cost transparency for customers
Enhanced forecasting capabilities allowed Avance Clinical to give customers greater visibility into projected costs—an important consideration for biotech customers. This ultimately strengthened Avance Clinical’s client relationships.
Increased departmental accountability and empowerment
PS Cloud and FM Cloud’s comprehensive and unified database provided Avance Clinical department heads with enhanced real-time data capabilities, allowing them to take ownership of financial planning and resource allocation.
Improved forecasting accuracy and business planning
Real-time data and analytics helped Avance Clinical achieve more accurate forecasting for short-term and long-term business planning.
This empowered the leadership team to predict future trends, supporting proactive—and not reactive—decision-making.
Enhanced financial visibility
Avance Clinical revolutionized its approach to financial data using Certinia PS Cloud and FM Cloud.
With Certinia, they took revenue snapshots and reviewed backlog data every first day of the month. This provided them with an accurate point-in-time view of their financial performance.
Optimized resource utilization
Empowered by deeper insights into their financial performance, department heads leveraged a bottom-up and top-down budgeting approach to manage budgets and effectively align with business goals.
Granular insights into projected resource requirements also enabled Avance Clinical to ensure that their customer projects are resourced at the right level and at the right time.
Greater cost transparency for customers
Enhanced forecasting capabilities allowed Avance Clinical to give customers greater visibility into projected costs—an important consideration for biotech customers. This ultimately strengthened Avance Clinical’s client relationships.
Increased departmental accountability and empowerment
PS Cloud and FM Cloud’s comprehensive and unified database provided Avance Clinical department heads with enhanced real-time data capabilities, allowing them to take ownership of financial planning and resource allocation.
Improved forecasting accuracy and business planning
Real-time data and analytics helped Avance Clinical achieve more accurate forecasting for short-term and long-term business planning.
This empowered the leadership team to predict future trends, supporting proactive—and not reactive—decision-making.
Avance Clinical unlocks financial control and operational excellence
Results
With Certinia PS Cloud and FM Cloud, Avance Clinical revamped its financial operations, which in turn produced broader operational enhancements.
Gaining comprehensive, real-time visibility into project financial data gave Avance Clinical the ability to make timely and informed decisions, generate more accurate forecasts that enable proactive business decisions, strengthen budget control and departmental accountability, and optimize resource utilization through improved projections.
Ultimately, Avance Clinical’s refreshed internal workflows positioned the CRO for sustained business growth and operational excellence.
Increased resource utilization
Improved departmental visibility
Enhanced forecasting accuracy
What our clients say
“Simple tools cannot solve complex problems. But the sophistication of Certinia allows for solving complex problems. The reward at the end of that can be very powerful.”
- Tyler Flora
- Senior Director, Professional Services
Avalara
“Since deploying the Certinia platform, we've seen consistent increases in billable utilization and realized project margins enabling us to exceed our margin expansion targets while improving the quality of the services delivered to our clients.”
- Kurt Kuelz
- Vice President - Global Customer Outcomes
Siemens Digital Industries Software
“Certinia PS Cloud drives the highest levels of data quality across our professional services and higher levels of performance from our resources.”
- David Laffineuse
- Worldwide Director of Service Delivery
Thales
"Most customers don't want to worry about back-end systems, but they want them to be reliable, scalable, and they want their supporting partner to understand them."
- Mark Conklin
- Senior Director of Operations
Salesforce
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