Microsoft’s vision for the people-ready business in pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical companies face unprecedented business challenges as they target the discovery, development, and distribution of new drug therapies in a highly regulated and increasingly cost sensitive ecosystem.

While research and development costs continue to escalate, companies must address expanding global and local regulations, drying up revenue streams due to patent expirations, and mounting pressures from cost containment programs in the health markets around the world. In this increasingly competitive business environment, successful life sciences companies will need to transform themselves into highly collaborative, consumer-focused companies.

Microsoft understands that people are the key to business success and improved consumer health. Armed with the right knowledge when they need it, people are in a position to deliver the best possible results, driving breakthrough innovation, set up high value relationships with customers and improve operational efficiency in the business.

The key to growth and cost reduction

Recognizing people as the most important asset to the life sciences industry, it is critical that people are empowered to deliver the best possible results through real-time access to information and easy-to-use applications.

Innovative technology solutions need to provide a rapid, cost-effective approach for people within life sciences to deliver innovation and improve operational efficiency in order to generate return on investment in the information systems. Technology solutions must enable seamless collaboration between industry professionals, customers, and business partners, to improve operations and decision making across the industry value chain.

Under the vision of a People Ready Business, Microsoft and its partners have developed solutions that span the entire Pharmaceutical value chain from Discovery through to Sales & Marketing. It recognizes that only through transparent integration of operations across areas, will companies be able to realize the kind of efficiencies needed to achieve breakthrough success.

• Drug Discovery
  
  To streamline the critical business processes, two fundamental issues must be addressed - the complex mix of disconnected data sources that companies use for storing information related to the scientific process and connecting researchers across the globe, and providing them with relevant information.
  
  Researchers need to be provided with a single, comprehensive view of internal research and external information making it significantly easier to perform target identification and validation. Microsoft’s solutions integrate and render data from lab equipment, informatics sources and genomics repositories, and enable scientists to annotate and share insights in a highly collaborative and secure environment.
• Development
  
  A large portion of the costs associated with bringing new therapies to market are incurred during the Clinical development phase. The ability to reduce the duration and expense of this cycle has a direct impact on both the time to regulatory approval and time to peak revenue. Recent and highly-visible failures of products in late-stage development underscore the importance of making no-go decisions quickly.
  
  To break down the information barriers in this process, Microsoft and its partners are delivering software solutions that automate and streamline the Clinical trials process. Compliant collaboration and document management solutions allow developers to find, use and share the wealth of information from Clinical trials more easily and intuitively.
• Manufacturing + Supply Chain
  
  While supply chain management, enterprise resource planning, plant floor visibility, and track-and-trace solutions have enabled cost reductions in recent years for a wide range of industries, in the life sciences industry the expenses for supply chain and plant floor have remained relatively high. In many instances data is still stored in isolated, proprietary systems - or even worse in paper documents - making it very difficult to respond with speed and accuracy when conditions change or problems occur.
  
  Today, the concern for patient safety has caused regulators to request a tightened, rigidly controlled supply chain that requires collaboration and integration not only within a company’s operations, but also outside the organization along the distribution channel. This enforces constituents in the supply chain to collaborate across the entire value chain while maintaining compliance in their document and records management functions.
  
  Microsoft provides built-in business intelligence features that can streamline data integration and improve batch track & trace which is needed to meet regulatory requirements. They empower manufacturing executives to evaluate and query historical production information in real time using analytics, dashboards, and reporting, and trigger notifications that enable new levels of efficiency and productivity. These types of software solutions help to accelerate the evolution to demand-driven manufacturing strategies, which drive integration across the value chain.
• Sales & Marketing
  
  Pharmaceutical companies are rethinking the way that they market and sell their products. An ever-increasing deployment of sales representatives has realized limited incremental return, while the amount of time that sales representatives are able to spend with physicians has shrunk dramatically over the past five years. Executives are facing difficult questions as they develop their strategies: How big should our sales force be? How do we allocate resources and efforts across products? How do we improve the value of interactions with physicians and with consumers?
  
  Microsoft and partners deliver innovative solutions to improve the Sales Force performance and help executives to develop multi-channel strategies, which provide well-integrated capabilities to deliver information across multiple modalities.

Connecting the dots

No single vendor can meet an organization’s complex needs and often multiple systems are in use within a company. To deliver the value, the solutions for Pharmaceutical companies need be able to integrate and interoperate, thus to be able to share and automatically process information across system boundaries.

Microsoft allows its customers and industry partners to focus on the business value by providing a highly productive, intuitive development environment that can leverage open standards and supports interoperability.

Are your people ready?

Armed with the right information technology tools, people in the Pharmaceutical industry can deliver success in a challenging business environment. Designed specifically to provide a technology infrastructure that reduces complexity, streamlines information flow, and improves collaboration and productivity, Microsoft’s solutions can open the door to integrated innovation that gives life sciences companies the competitive edge they need to pull ahead.