BRISTOL MYERS SQUIBB
At a small logistics start-up in Calcutta, she was introduced to SAP for the first time, an experience that shaped the direction of the following two decades. She had already been associated with BMS as an Accenture account for 15 years before joining the company directly, drawn in part by new leadership pursuing change agents and, on a personal level, by a need to step back from the travel demands of consulting life.
Building an intelligent enterprise Since taking up her role, Sharmita has overseen a change in how BMS thinks about its finance and procurement technology. She explains:“ The shift has been from the systems of record, what already happened, to the systems that actively shape what happens next.” Where the function was once concerned largely with processing transactions accurately, the ambition now is real-time visibility and AI-assisted decision-making, with platforms designed to flag risks and exceptions before they become problems.
That ambition has to be balanced against the realities of operating in a regulated industry.“ The biggest challenge is balancing speed with control,” Sharmita says.“ Every acceleration, be it with AI, automation, a faster close, it has to be built with compliance and auditability inside right from day one, not bolted on afterwards.” Scale makes this more difficult, as a change that is simple in a single market or plant can become genuinely complex once it is applied in a range of markets, each with different regulations, data standards and legacy systems.
“ The shift has been from the systems of record, what already happened, to the systems that actively shape what happens next”
Sharmita Srivastava Vice President and Global Head of IT Finance Bristol Myers Squibb
Sharmita feels that standardisation for its own sake is not the answer.“ At that scale, uniformity or standardisation is the enemy of a good design,” she says.“ You can’ t force one market’ s process onto another and call it standardised.” Instead, every transformation decision has to account for variation in regulatory requirements, local supplier ecosystems and plant-specific operating realities while still landing on a common core platform.
A simple buying experience One of the most visible initiatives at BMS is an enterprise-wide procurement transformation designed to give BMS employees a simple buying experience. The programme began with process simplification, cutting down the approval process and reducing approval layers overall.
6 September 2026