Assign modules on offcanvas module position to make them visible in the sidebar.

iCAST Symphony Business Analytics for Life Sciences

Business Performance Management

The life sciences industry is becoming even more competitive, compounded by expiring patents, pricing pressures and shrinking margins, increased regulatory compliance, and a lack of integrated information. Life sciences organizations need to use all the tools at their disposal to operate more efficiently and increase revenue. Working to keep up with an expanding drug market, pharmaceutical companies need business performance management solutions that allow them to make better business decisions.

Given the right information-enabling technology and leadership, life sciences decision-makers can become performance managers  delivering sustainable competitive advantage by growing revenue faster, reducing operational expenses further and leveraging long-term assets better.

Performance management has become an important part of the management and control cycle, with major emphasis on alignment and visibility for regulatory and compliance reasons. It is also driven by the need to get a deeper understanding of what is going on within business processes.

Planning and forecasting helps to establish a reliable view of the future and answer the question, “What should we do?”



Marketing

In the life sciences industry, marketing is complicated by the multiplicity of players who influence the purchasing decision including physicians, healthcare managers, pharmacy and procurement managers, wholesalers and distributors, and patients themselves. Most of these groups will have a degree of influence on most purchasing decisions. Integrating a pharmaceutical company’s marketing and branding strategy into the sales process is perhaps its greatest challenge. Areas of decision where iCAST can support life sciences marketing processes include:

         Market opportunities
         Competitive positioning
         Product life cycle management
         Pricing
         Demand generation

Product and brand positioning

Developing the right product, the right way, at the right time. Product and brand positioning is critical to life sciences business and competitive ability. Investing in the creation of a new product and its brand is a must for business success. Decision-making for life sciences companies will revolve around:

         Drug discovery
         Product Portfolio
         Product development milestones
         Market feedback

Sales

Understanding sales channels and the needs of wholesalers and distributors are critical. Sales has clear accountability for results, requires information and thrives on the most integrated decision-making capabilities. iCAST Symphony can help life sciences organizations where their decision-making in five areas related to sales:

           Sales results
           Customer and product profitability
           Sales tactics
           Sales forecast
           Sales plan variance

Demand fulfillment

Demand fulfillment drives the work in purchasing, production, distribution, logistics and inventory management, with input from the frontline functions of the business — sales, marketing and finance. In life sciences companies, demand fulfillment has the responsibility to lead following core areas of decision-making:

     Inventory management
     Distribution and logistics
     Cost and quality management

Customer services

In life sciences companies, the customer relationship is complex. A customer can be a patient or a health professional. Companies need to engage health professionals in a systematic and sustained way, often at an individual level. One important measure of this value is the level of medical information provided. It can offer valuable insights into how customers respond to a company’s products and provide early warning of potential quality or patient targeting issues. Customer services have four core areas of the life sciences company’s decision making:

    On-time delivery
    Information, complaints and claims
    Service benchmarks
    Service value

The sales and marketing advantage

Line of business executives in sales and marketing at life sciences organizations can achieve significant advantage using business analytics. These include the ability to identify market trends ahead of the competition, better understand customer behavior, and make business decisions with greater confidence.

Advantage can be found by:

Increasing demand generation:

    Target the ideal customer, through ideal channel at the ideal time with the ideal message
    Attract and retain the most valuable customers
    Decrease direct marketing costs by targeting prospects most likely to respond
    Score customer response to intelligently route leads to the right sales rep

Increasing sales revenue:

Identify the right prospect at the right time with the right offer to reduce sales cycle, improve close rates, and maximize customer lifetime value

    Increase lead conversion by targeting “sweet spot” leads based on past conversion success
    Increase customer profitability through personalized cross-sell, up-sell

Tracking marketing effectiveness:

    Automate process to pull financial and campaign/ program data from multiple, consolidated sources
    Perform rolling analysis of marketing campaigns
    Achieve a 360-degree view of marketing channels – offline and digital including all relevant customer-marketing interactions

Better decision-making accelerates better performance

Life sciences companies are expected to have a depth of insight into their market and customers’ needs and yet market uncertainty is greater than ever. iCAST Symphony Business Analytics makes life sciences companies better equipped to leverage the data to make intelligent decisions and link business strategies with departmental plans.

The integration of business and process management to derive business intelligence is the heart of the iCAST performance management framework. It provides the ability to manage and meet business goals with accurate performance measurement. Businesses need an integrated performance monitoring framework like iCAST to react quickly to changing market demands.

With iCAST to analyze customer behavior, risk and profitability, life sciences companies can drive more effective marketing campaigns. Also, the iCAST Performance Management Suite provides a common business and technical framework that allows departments and functional areas to adhere to a common set of goals and objectives. iCAST processes include consolidation of financial and operational information, modeling and monitoring of key performance indicators (KPIs) linked to organizational strategy. iCAST on SOA platform increases enterprise agility; allows firms to easily assemble and modify business processes for collaborative business performance.

iCAST Symphony can help organizations accelerate their performance through:

•    Better sales performance — with insight into critical sales metrics across regions and individuals
•    Increased sales efficiency — improved assessment and planning with better territory management
•    Improved marketing effectiveness — deliver strong campaign analysis and improved product and brand management with better prescriber segmentation
•    Higher customer satisfaction — achieve efficient distribution and delivery with better understanding of the balance between inventory and customer requirements

Solution benefits

When you use business analytics to its full potential, the different roles in the enterprise can benefit:

    Executives can use predictive intelligence in decisions at all levels — strategic, operational and tactical
    Business managers can recognize which factors influence outcomes and pinpoint issues that drive improvements
    Business analysts can attain a detailed understanding of the relationships hidden in both numerical and text data to generate focused predictive intelligence
    System managers can take advantage of non-intrusive integration with operational systems and flexible deployment
    Underpinning these advantages is ability for users to gain a more complete perspective of the business and view descriptive, diagnostic and predictive information.