Pharmaceutical company

One pharmaceutical company is taking steps to be one of the 20 percent with a customer-centric focus as one way to capture market share and create new revenue opportunities. Inconsistent communications with healthcare providers (HCPs) and disparate customer relationship management (CRM) systems presented a barrier to achieving these goals because they did not provide marketing and sales teams with information they needed to create cross-selling opportunities. This realization led the company to evaluate options that enable a more holistic view of customers.

With two siloed CRM systems, the pharmaceutical company had no ability to anticipate customer needs and provide a differentiated customer experience that results in increased revenue. To reach these goals, a Customer Information Management (CIM) solution that connects disparate systems to provide a 360-degree view of the customer was necessary.

Not only did the company want tools to connect the information contained in each CRM system, but sales and marketing teams wanted insight into their healthcare provider (HCP) and retail customers’ interests in new treatments. This knowledge supports efforts to continue conversations with the HCP through a variety of communications methods—email, digital marketing, telesales, sales calls and marketing campaigns. More importantly, the pharmaceutical company’s sales and marketing teams wanted to tailor ongoing communications to each customer’s specific areas of interest.

Because the company has a lean information technology organization and a mandate to deliver results quickly, a solution that could be developed and implemented with limited investment of internal resources and infrastructure was needed. These requirements led to the choice of OpenText to handle the software, hosting, operations, support and stewardship of the CIM.

A cloud-based program that includes a commercial data warehouse, master data management, data integration and business intelligence components was implemented in several phases.

The OpenText™ Alloy™ unified data management and integration solution provides full data visibility throughout all customer interactions. The solution is built to address the shift from application-centric management of information to data-centric architecture, making it possible to solve the most challenging data management and data integration scenarios.

The “turnkey” solution includes tools that integrate the CIM capabilities with the pharmaceutical company’s enterprise systems, which include SAP, Veeva Systems, Salesforce® and offers an analytics dashboard to enhance data accessibility and to provide the 360-degree view of the customer.

OpenText’s experience in the Life Sciences industry was critical to development of the solution. Because this was a “greenfield” project, it required a deep knowledge of the commercial processes of a pharmaceutical company in order to define requirements and develop a strategy to build and future proof a CIM system.

The pharmaceutical company’s ability to work only with OpenText throughout the process—as opposed to multiple application vendors—resulted in completion of a critical phase of the project four months earlier than planned.

The sales and marketing teams now have new insight capabilities that provide a holistic view of the customer. This ability to connect with customers and more fully understand the customer relationship leads to increased revenue through cross-selling and upselling opportunities.

An added benefit is delivery and ongoing management of the solution as a managed service, which relieves the burden of managing the CIM internally and allows the in-house information technology organization to focus on critical day-to-day activities. Managed services fit the pharmaceutical company’s lean organization business model because it did not require hiring more employees or managing multiple contractors.

The initial project focused on business in the United States for the pharmaceutical company, but it is a global project. The high performing, future-proofed, modern platform provides an agile solution that can be easily scaled and leveraged throughout all regions as business needs demand.

The vice president of Sales at the pharmaceutical company summarized the main benefits of the OpenText solution: “Our company can have a dialogue with HCPs with each interaction to pick up where they last left off. The ability to connect with customers and more fully understand the customer relationship leads to increased revenue through cross-selling and upselling opportunities.”

¹ Gartner Inc., Predicts 2017: Digital Increases Pressure on CIOs in Life Science, December 2016