Speeding up digital transformation in the life science industry

In the light of industry growth with a record of 79 approvals of new drugs last year but rising development cost and perceived inefficiency of product development and commercialisation, stakeholders from biophama majors and SMEs, agencies and digitalisation specialists gathered to see how cloud-based software can overcome current obstacles to compliantly bring speed and cost-reduction to the system. 

In Madrid, the event’s organiser, cloud-based software leader Veeva Systems announced major extensions to its digital customer relationship management (CRM) and content management solutions portfolio. Veeva’s goal is to help life science companies to bring products to the market much more rapidly through and integrated cloud-based software suite. Three latest extensions to the company’s suite of CRM and content management applications are designed to further boost efficiency of enterprises operations.

Veeva Align, which has been already adopted by Astellas Pharma, Abbvie and two further top-20 pharma companies, decreased time to create territory alignments by 75% on average and led to a tenfold reduction in process steps. „Veeva Align allows us to make major changes to sales force territories faster and more precisely. Alignments that used to take five days now take as little as a few minutes,“ said Ian Knowlton, Head of CRM at Astellas. According to Jan van den Burg, VP Commercial Strategy Europe at Veeva Systems, Veeva Align is the first system allowing companies to align and to target their customers in a single application in order to close the gap between their sales strategy and execution and thus „more quickly respond to the needs of the business.“ Integration into Veeva CRM allows sales operations more efficiently to drive execution across multiple channels.

CRM Engage Webinar is the first digital tool to manage online events and webinars without compliance risk, a feature highly demanded by time-strapped physicians. Recent surveys indicate that 96% of them expect to benefit from attending events online. For companies, the application built in CRM Events Management, online events is one of the most efficient means for marketing and medical affairs teams to reach more healthcare professionals (HCPs) through communication channels they prefer, i.e. phtablets. Integration with Veeva Vault, the company’s cloud-based content management platform for regulatory, development and commercialisation-associated information, ensures that HCPs get fast access to the information they need about a product or clinical trail. Integration with Veeva CRM allows all company departments to see the interactions with a specific HPC and thus eliminates double work and efficient interaction.

Vault PromoMats Brand Portal, which will be available by December 2017, is designed to create brand portals that organize all information in place for a single product. For company marketing teams corresponding brand portals offer the same advantages as for affiliates or regulatory agencies: sharing of digital assets and campaigns in one place. The new digital asset management system allow companies to expand the visiblity of product-related content.

Veeva Systems work to improve the digital supply chain for the life sciences sector, which currently is characterised by double work, complex country-specific approval, regional silos and a multitude of different channels. The demand of biopharmaceutical enterprises for a digital asset system that boosts efficacy and productivity is growing. Within just the two past years, San Francisco headquartered Veeva doubled its customer base to more than 550 life sciences companies. Its latest oncology data solution Veeva Oncology Link helps development and commercial departments to identify key opinion leaders much faster and thus has the potential to speed up collaboration. The digital resource consolidates thousands of global experts and millions of activities, including publications, clinical trials, and events, in a single, complete source of oncology data.