Rapid Redeployment: Redefining Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing Processes
By Dhiren Patel, Alok Gupta
Dynamic market conditions and increasing pressure on sales and marketing are pushing pharmaceutical companies to make swift deployment decisions. While these decisions are often complex and time-consuming, they require quick delivery to the field. When this happens in mid-sales cycle, implementation can be disruptive.
Cognizant’s Rapid Redeployment (RR) solution helps pharmaceutical companies quickly implement sales alignment decisions, with flexibility and transparency in operations. RR facilitates an uninterrupted process that begins with making changes to an existing deployment and ends with final approval.
Key benefits include:
- Flexibility, to configure business unit-level rules; it de-links the sales position with geographical data, for simple adaptability to complex scenarios
- Analytical framework, to support and facilitate quick, informed decision-making
- Operational efficiency during the deployment and alignment cycle
- User-friendly experience, with map-driven visualization of deployment scenarios
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Innovation and Rapid Redeployment
Cognizant’s Rapid Redeployment solution changes the way the deployment process is managed in a pharmaceutical sales force. Among its innovations are:
- Consolidated workflow in one place ensures that all workflows related to sales operations planning are in a single application, minimizing data discrepancies and exchanges
- Automated data exchange minimizes manual interventions, reducing data errors
- Home office governance filters approved changes in the process, reducing rework in downstream applications
- Upfront field sales force involvement in the deployment process minimizes changes later and improves home office productivity
- Analytics-driven changes improve the quality of business decisions
- Visibility to BU-specific rule means the home office can make changes, with no spreadsheets, and gain access to databases or presentation decks.
These innovations are clear differentiators from solutions traditionally used by pharmaceutical companies (ranging from low-cost, semi-manual, Excel®-based systems to large, high-cost legacy systems). They enable RR to:
- Help companies make top- and bottom-line processes more efficient; RR enables the sales force to collaborate for alignment refinement
- Facilitate efficient handling of changes in structural (macro-level) and customer (micro-level) alignment
- Move companies towards "Field Force Empowerment" in which the field force influences tactical changes made by management, facilitating buy-in and adoption (an engaged field force is directly proportional to top-line growth)
- Provide a platform for call plan and sample plan collaboration to initiate team-selling activity, significantly reducing turnaround time
- Offer features such as flexible business rules and a robust workflow approval system; these reduce manual processes and improve process workflow, helping boost the bottom line
- Distinguish between changes in "geography alignment" and those in "sales position alignment," allowing users to handle multiple alignment scenarios
- Provide tighter control over tactical change implementation, via the solution’s analytical reporting
Figure 1 - Rapid Redeployment solution value proposition
The practical business applications of Cognizant’s Rapid Redeployment solution might best be illustrated by citing a few recent case studies:
- A leading pharmaceutical company with a sales force of 6,000, including 500+ field managers, was encountering problems in its alignment process.
- A large biotechnology company had its district manager called for emergency national duty and required an absence management strategy and realignment of its sales team.
- A reputable New Jersey hospital needed to be aligned with a sales professional working in Florida.
In all three scenarios, multiple legacy systems were operating in silos, using poorly structured data that created quality challenges. The standard approach to handling requests was via manual system updates or spreadsheets and text files. As a result, the redeployment process was cumbersome, error-prone, time-consuming and costly.
For all these scenarios, Cognizant proposed a four-fold Rapid Redeployment solution:
- Centralizing multiple functions through:
- Streamlined automated data feeds
- Territory alignment reporting
- Workload indexing
- Hierarchy management
- Prescriber list maintenance
- Handling specialty changes
- Improving usability and stabilizing processes via:
- An improved tool for handling redeployment changes
- Improved quality of data and process
- Alignment and structural changes supporting flexible approval workflows to manage alignment changes
- Aligning the data model to business goals by providing:
- Prescriber — Account level data model
- Business rules aligned to territories
- Enabling field management by providing:
- Geographic visualization of alignment
- Automated approval workflows
- Comprehensive alignment reporting
As a result, all three companies benefited from the comprehensive workflow and executed an end-to-end process. The Rapid Redeployment solution:
- Implemented a standard integration framework to integrate with upstream and downstream systems
- Provided the flexibility to handle multiple alignment scenarios based on market realities and merger situations
- Used a map-based graphical user interface (GUI) for field users to make changes visually
- Helped define a robust governance and business rules framework
Implications for the Future of Work
With the Future of Work comes greater collaboration among organizations and individuals, especially Millennial employees (those who entered the workforce after 2000.) Rapid Redeployment is designed to enhance teamwork both physical and virtual, both local and global (another Future of Work attribute).
By providing such a collaborative environment, with proper approval workflows and authorization management, RR provides a platform to control call plan/product sampling-related issues. That facilitates a disruption-less environment, so that redeployment changes can be incorporated in the system.
Among RR’s attributes to achieve the above are:
- Alignment changes. RR has a specific module to differentiate geographic changes from sales position-related ones. This allows the solution to handle any type of alignment situation.
- Assignments and placements. RR utilizes an advanced analytical pool of resources by providing an optimal way to match sales people to territories. It accounts for multidimensional data inputs to reach an optimal territory-to-person match. Users can collect, organize and analyze data online and provides scenario-based models to make informed decisions.
- User-friendly interface. RR simplifies the process of redeployment, by allowing the user to make timely changes throughout the deployment cycle. The solution is built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that can easily implement complex business rules. The administration module allows the end user to control the redeployment changes.
Figure 2 - Optimizing sales realignment
- Analytical reports. RR has a built-in framework for giving users robust analytical reports. It functions as a single source of information, and can be integrated across the entire sales process.
- Extensive data management. RR can "talk" to other upstream/downstream applications. Its flexible integration framework, based on SOA concepts, can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) and sales force automation (SFA) applications, as well as with customer data warehouse systems.
Figure 3 - The sales alignment process continuum
Cognizant’s Rapid Redeployment solution can be used to streamline the pharmaceutical sales redeployment process with minimal disruption to business operations. RR achieves this by using a single source of information, including configurable and integrated planning workflows that enable:
- Data quality improvement
- Reduction in overall cycle times
- Reduction in operational costs
- Better adoption of the process by the field
- A healthy mix of home office governance and field inputs
RR provides an end-to-end application framework to optimize change management, gain better insight into sales and marketing outcomes, and, ultimately, increase revenue.
Figure 4 - Typical workflows