Pharmaceutical Industry
Over the past 18 years IT Strategies has been engaged by several pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to help implement information technology solutions that meet the industry’s unique business needs.
Our experience spans several business activities within the industry:
- Distribution & Logistics
- Field sales management
- Sales and customer services
- Marketing management
- Manufacturing
- Quality and Compliance
Most of our engagements have focused on recommending how technology can be used to improve business operations. Often we have subsequently been asked to assist in implementing the recommended solutions.
In the course of our engagements we have developed a thorough understanding of pharmaceutical commercial operations (which often differ markedly from other industries). We understand the challenges presented by the industry’s unique “customer” structure and the increasing number of entitles–healthcare professionals, employers, plans, payers–that have to be considered and accommodated in the sales and sales fulfillment process; a process made more difficult by the fact that the pharmaceutical company is seldom a direct participant in downstream transactions.
We have implemented technology solutions based on pre-packaged, configurable applications, such as SAP, Siebel, and Salesforce.com (SFDC). We have also developed tailored solutions such as special-purpose SFA applications, and we have created targeted data warehousing, reporting, and analytics solutions, using Oracle, Business Objects, and Siebel Analytics. We often serve as an intermediary between business users and the technical team. We help business users define and formalize their requirements. We then work with the technical team to translate the business requirements into a technical solution. We work back and forth between these groups to solve the complex technical issues that inevitably arise and to keep the business requirements synchronized with evolving business conditions.
In our data warehouse and reporting engagements we have integrated third-party syndicated data (from IMS America, Wolter Kluwers Health (WKHealth), Verispan, and several other vendors) with data from in-house applications, such as Siebel SFA, SAP ERP, and the CARS/IS contract management system.
Consequently we have developed a deep—almost unique—understanding of the idiosyncrasies of the data sources: how the information is collected, delivered, processed and stored, and how it should be accessed and blended with other data. Often misconceptions and lack of understanding of where the data comes from, what it means, and what caveats should be kept in mind is a serious source of confusion and conflict among both business users and technical specialists. We use our knowledge and experience with the data to help arrive at a common understanding of the intelligence derived from the analysis of the various data sources both individually and in combination.
Recently we have been retained by newly emerging pharmaceutical firms that do not need the large infrastructure and accompanying formality of traditional pharmaceutical companies but can benefit from a more streamlined approach that benefits from current and emerging technologies that are more affordable, require smaller initial investments but also can conform to the stringent regulatory and quality requirements of the industry.