The Digitalisation of the Pharmaceutical Industry

We worked with a Multinational Pharmaceutical client in Canada that were looking to digitise, standardise and automate manual processes.

The client requirement was to digitise the entire company to help modernise and lean up company operations. This involved standardisation of complex business processes spanning different departments, locations and countries. There was also the need for centralised storage and retrieval of relevant associated documents and the maintenance of an audit trail and historical data.

We carried out an audit of the company to understand the current scenario and what would be required for an improved level of efficiency and reliability.  Our team identified the following challenges:

• Work was captured on papers for each department which slowed the approval process;
• Ease of use and consideration of the law of the land while standardising the processes across the world;
• Information captured to be used by the entire organisation was not organised centrally;
• Delays and inappropriate statuses and results due to manual processes.

Solutions

Our team managed to solve the challenges highlighted by the audit by using the following solutions:

• A detailed study of the existing processes and a clear definition of the workflows considering all aspects approved by all respective countries;
• Architecting the process to quickly accommodate any changes in the operations and enable the monitoring and maintaining processes for optimal efficiency;
• Use of standard business management process framework and implementation using specialised software like IBM Business Process Manager and ServiceNow;
• Implementation for managing SLAs and Escalations more efficiently and promptly;
• Integration with existing software systems to make use of the available centralised data;
• BPM development following the Software Development Life Cycle with the AGILE model;
• Efficient communication by the implementation of auto mailing to report the status of processes at various stages to help users and management to track the status and performance.

As a result of the implementation of our new systems the client had an improvement in efficiency and reliability by standardising its entire internal processes across the various countries where the client had offices. The use of such a standard workflow framework and careful implementation considering all aspects of the processes, improved the efficiency and reliability of the system while also increasing the customer satisfaction level.