Cencora Elevates Planning Accuracy and Global Collaboration With Vena

Achieved 100% user adoption across business functions and regions

Improved planning accuracy and forecasting consistency across six business units

Enabled more strategic decision-making through reliable, scalable workflows

The Challenge: Providing a Consistent Planning Process for a Global Business

As a global pharmaceutical solutions organization, Cencora (formerly AmerisourceBergen, number 10 on Fortune 500) needed a modern, scalable FP&A solution to unify planning across regions, improve accuracy, and enable more strategic decision-making.

With business units across the globe, its financial teams relied on localized Excel models and legacy planning tools that hindered collaboration and consistency.

“We were using a variety of systems and disconnected spreadsheets,” recalls Trevor Hanbury, SVP, Finance at Cencora. “That made it difficult to align forecasts, standardize planning assumptions, and achieve visibility across the enterprise.”

Without a unified platform, business unit finance leads spent significant time consolidating data manually, leading to inefficiencies and delays during budgeting and reporting cycles. The finance team lacked a single source of truth for forecasting and planning, making it difficult to scale processes and provide stakeholders with reliable insights.

That’s when the Cencora team found Vena.

Young female pharmacist working in her large pharmacy taking inventory

Achieving Scalable Planning With Consistent, High-Impact Results With Vena

Trevor led the rollout of Vena across multiple Cencora divisions. By unifying the company’s planning framework, Vena allowed Cencora to standardize processes, align business units and integrate seamlessly with existing ERP systems, such as SAP.

The Excel-native interface made it easy for teams to adopt the platform quickly, resulting in 100% user adoption across all in-scope functions and regions. Because finance teams across the America, Europe and APAC regions were already comfortable working in Excel, the transition required minimal training. This familiarity eliminated resistance to change and accelerated adoption across geographies. Instead of learning an unfamiliar system, users could immediately apply their existing skills within a more powerful, connected framework.

Everywhere Vena was deployed, the response was overwhelmingly positive, with no resistance or pushback from stakeholders.

Centralized planning and estimating templates now support real-time collaboration and consistent assumptions across teams, significantly improving forecast reliability. Teams have reported substantial time savings, with one division reducing forecasting turnaround times by more than 30 percent. What previously took days, like variance reporting, can now be completed within hours. This speed and accuracy have given executives greater confidence in the data, enabling faster, more informed decisions across the organization.

With Vena, Cencora has not only built a more scalable and resilient FP&A infrastructure but also fostered a culture of process improvement and operational agility. Trevor credits the success to Vena’s intuitive interface, smooth implementation, and its ability to drive value without disrupting existing workflows.