“Our company’s just gotten twice as big,”
said Zander Poth, Allergan’s associate
director of sales planning and analytics.
Allergan, a unique global
pharmaceutical company, is the
leader of a new industry model:
growth pharma. Allergan (formerly
Actavis) has been on an impressive
trajectory for years. It understands
growth, and how to grow intelligently.
Recently, a subset of Allergan’s
therapeutics sales organization
partnered with ZS to solve a growing
problem: ensuring a single source of
truth across multiple business units.
Business Issue
Buy-and-bill is growing fast
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Reps need access to mobile, reliable and
actionable data so they can quickly get
the information they need and spend
most of their time selling. The more a company grows, the more necessary it
becomes to centralize and streamline
that information.
Since 2009, buy-and-bill pharmaceutical
sales have dramatically expanded, with
compound annual growth of more than
5% between 2009 and 2012. As these
companies grow, data can’t stay siloed
in ever-multiplying and expanding
business units. Manual processes need
to be automated and streamlined. Data
needs to be integrated, analyzed and
shared with the whole organization,
from sales ops to the field.
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The Problem
More data, more problems
Due to new product indications,
Allergan’s buy-and-bill therapeutics
space had grown rapidly.
Manual processes and decentralized
data were no longer an option.
When Zander assumed sales
operations responsibility for part of
Allergan’s therapeutics space, he
recognized some areas needed to be
addressed:
- Consistency—Each business unit used
different data sources.
- Efficiency—Operations needed to be
streamlined to keep pace with growth
and to reduce costs.
- Accuracy—Manual processes needed
to be automated.
- Flexibility—Allergan needed a futureproof
solution that evolves with the
company.
- Transparency—Reps needed greater
visibility into specialty pharmacy data
processing and sales crediting.
“We had four different places where
people could get sales information, and
it didn’t match up,” said Zander. “We had
to make the tool more useful and
well-understood.”
The Solution
A new relationship with ZS
Allergan and ZS had been working together in multiple, one-off projects with separate teams for years. Zander decided to change this relationship and began weekly meetings with one dedicated, global ZS team for Allergan. “We were able to look at all the projects Allergan and ZS had done together. Then we took the best approaches and applied them to everything we did.” Specifically, Allergan and ZS set out to make operations:
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Consistent—Integrate disparate data sources with common business rules.
- Efficient—Redesign and consolidate reports for the sales force. Create a streamlined, mobile, accurate view of sales and attainment figures and daily, tactical call planning reports.
- Accurate—Use ZS’s ARTiS™ data management and reporting solution to integrate MicroStrategy, Informatica and Oracle; gather, collect and clean data; then provide a single source of truth for mobile field and HQ reporting, as well as marketing, senior management and business analytics.
- Flexible—Keep processes running smoothly with weekly check-ins and yearly assessments to ensure that operations stay efficient.
- Transparent—Give reps access to physician-level data reported by specialty pharmacy providers (SPPs) and integrate buy-and-bill and specialty pharmacy data into one report.
The Results
Faster, better and less expensive
Now the field can spend more time selling because the information it receives is accurate, timely and helpful. “The field really appreciates the value,” said Zander. “We get a lot of positive feedback.”
Because of the ongoing partnership with ZS and the solutions enabled by ARTiS™, Allergan has experienced:
- $75% cycle time reduction of complicated SPP data management
- 85% user adoption of mobile reports
- 24-7 field access to data portals for updating customer relationships and profiles
- Daily support for home office and field ad hoc requests, with more than 90% of queries resolved within one day
- A dedicated ZS team that understands Allergan’s business and can respond quickly to any request
- Ongoing, collaborative working sessions that help ensure Allergan adapts to emerging business needs
“When something comes up, I know I can tackle it with ZS in our next call,” said Zander. “We have good relationships with many vendors, but what’s unique about ZS is how they feel like part of our company. I believe the team supporting us is truly happy when we do well.”