GenAI in Action: The PHOENIX group Story
PHOENIX group, one of Europe’s largest healthcare distributors, partnered with BCG Platinion to drive a GenAI-led transformation that is optimizing operations, and enhancing service delivery across 29 countries.
Enhancing Operations and Connectivity Across a Pan-European Pharmaceutical Network
PHOENIX group manages one of Europe’s most intricate pharmaceutical distribution networks, operating across 29 countries. However, the scale of its operations brought growing complexity. Rising inventory holding costs and process inefficiencies placed pressure on market performance. Transport invoice validation remained largely manual, creating operational bottlenecks. Meanwhile, customer service teams were fielding over seven million calls annually—many of them repetitive and low-value. Adding to the challenge, a fragmented data environment and varying levels of digital maturity across regions made it difficult to drive and sustain innovation at an enterprise level
Building a Factory for the Future
To shift from isolated AI pilots to a unified, value-driven approach, PHOENIX partnered with BCG Platinion to transform AI from a technological experiment into a strategic business enabler.
Together, they created the GenAI Factory, a scalable and integrated framework designed to optimize inventory management, validate logistics costs, accelerate procurement, and scale AI use cases that deliver measurable impact across the enterprise.
Four Solutions That Moved the Needle Fast
The first wave of solutions included:
- AI-Powered Inventory Cockpit: providing real-time visibility and advanced forecasting to help country teams optimize stock levels and reduce working capital
- Transport Invoice Validator: automating logistics cost reviews and identifying cost-saving opportunities.
- AI Customer Service Agent: managing high-frequency inquiries, allowing human agents to focus on more complex, high-value cases.
- GenAI RFQ Machine: automating procurement workflows to speed up and simplify the sourcing process.
The Wholesale Inventory Cockpit
The Wholesale Inventory Cockpit demonstrates how business-driven ideas can be transformed into scalable digital solutions that deliver tangible results. Leveraging AI-powered forecasting, PHOENIX gained real-time visibility into optimal stock levels—replacing manual, Excel-based workflows with dynamic, data-driven insights. Built on existing data and cloud infrastructure, the cockpit is now being deployed at speed across multiple markets, setting a new standard for operational transparency and efficiency.
The AI Customer Service Agent
The AI Service Agent represents another strong early success. By automating roughly half of all incoming customer service inquiries primarily routine and repetitive ones, PHOENIX group empowered its service teams to dedicate more time to complex cases and relationship management. The solution enhances the overall customer experience, enables round-the-clock support, and fosters closer collaboration between business and IT teams.
Impact- Focussed
The GenAI Factory is now a core component of PHOENIX group’s broader digital transformation strategy, enabling the rapid scaling of proven AI use cases across its European footprint. Early implementations are already driving impact in four key areas: enhanced inventory forecasting, more precise logistics cost management, accelerated customer service, and more efficient procurement. By prioritizing high-value use cases, PHOENIX group successfully transformed early prototypes into fully operational solutions within just one year.
These advances go far beyond incremental improvement. They deliver measurable, enterprise-wide benefits. The results include reduced working capital tied up in inventory and stronger supply chain resilience, lower operational costs through automation of manual processes, improved customer and partner experiences through faster, more accurate responses, and employees empowered to focus on higher-value, strategic work.
For PHOENIX group, the outcome is a scalable, business-embedded AI Factory model that drives continuous innovation. For customers and partners, the transformation is already translating into more reliable access to medicines and healthcare products, higher service levels through instant AI-driven responses, and data-informed decision-making that enhances transparency and trust.
Building on this momentum, PHOENIX group is expanding and amplifying initiatives that have already demonstrated measurable impact. At the same time, PHOENIX group is extending the reach of AI productivity tools to more than 20,000 employees across Europe, ensuring that the benefits of intelligent automation continue to scale across the organization.
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