Source:Pharmpro.com
For many people, a trip to the doctor’s office for a physical often ends in a doctor’s summary of, “your tests were pretty good, and you seem pretty healthy, but…” followed by a directive for a little more exercise, potential change in diet, or a potential condition to be aware of. Often this if followed by the caution that, while the patient might be in good health now, old habits need to be replaced by a new approach to keep the patient healthy and to ward off potential new ailments.
The pharmaceutical industry enters late 2007 attempting to address a highly competitive global market place, increased price pressure, pipeline development challenges, impending patent expirations, and enormous costs of new development as well as associated sales and marketing costs to bring products to market.
The Drive To Deliver Better Business Intelligence
Pharmaceutical companies have attempted to address these problems with key technologies including ERP for resource planning, product lifecycle management, as well as complex models to mine and model data, provide reporting and root cause analysis, alerting, and to deliver greater business intelligence (BI). The early to mid 2000s specifically have seen the rise of spending and deployment of business intelligence and analytics to address a host of issues from new product development, to metrics management, compliance reporting and comprehensive clinical trails.
Aligning Metrics To Actual Work Conditions
Maybe most tellingly, the reality for most pharmaceutical and life sciences companies is that the metrics and performance management initiatives they are tracking are often not actually related to how people work. How can you have a consistent metric definition for drug development when each product development cycle and related clinical tests are different?
