CRM in Pharmaceutical Industry - Wearing a Lean Look

Wipro helped a pharma major save over £60 million through a 10-step Lean framework and also improved topline by increasing salesforce effectiveness

Client Background

Our client is a London-based pharma multinational that specializes in prescription medicines, pharmaceuticals, biologics and vaccines. With about 99,000 employees, it has operations in more than 100 countries. It also makes consumer products that range from skin treatment products, oral health and nutritional products.

We collaborated to enable significant improvement in business-centric IT metrics. The project was a demonstration of continuous improvement at a highly critical juncture in the program, requiring agility in analyzing a problem and responding in real time.

Industry Landscape

Expiring patents, pricing pressures driven by unsustainable increases in healthcare costs, increased regulations, with an added challenge of decreased R&D productivity, are redefining the industry landscape for top pharma companies. Big Pharma are, therefore, reinventing commercial models to sustain topline growth.

Opportunity

Our client was witnessing plateauing growth and profits and was dealing with increased regulatory costs and risks. With a portfolio of over 7000 applications, they were faced with increasing complexities and costs across engineering, manufacturing, sales, marketing and finance functions. The client’s IT budget spend as a percentage of revenue was exceeding peer averages.

Therefore, they recognized the need to evolve, stay agile and lean. The aim was to achieve application rationalization, increased standardization and reduced costs. They also wanted to improve effectiveness of their salesforce by transforming the CRM experience, enhancing sales collaboration and call reporting procedures, while tracking sales performance KPIs. Our client wanted to adopt these change initiatives to position themselves better to take advantage of a promising late-stage pipeline that was expected to spur double-digit growth over the next several years.

Solution

We partnered with the client to help it go Lean and streamline operations.

Going Lean

We helped formulate an innovative, Lean 10-step process framework, including:

Analysis – Identified upstream and downstream application components, their dependencies and risks associated with decommissioning.
Data Migration and Archival – All physical and electronic data was converted into an ISO standard long-term retention format and archived into a repository.
Release Licensing – All software components associated with the applications that were being retired were uninstalled and all associated documents such as SLA and escrow agreements were also shelved. We also freed up application licenses either for central license pool or for reuse by other teams.
Hardware Decommissioning – All hardware assets associated with the applications were decommissioned and assessed for reuse.

CRM Transformation

CRM was chosen as a core business transformation area to support sales collaboration.

We integrated an Oracle CRM On-Demand Application with several existing and new applications. This helped:

Application Configuration
Master Data Management
Application and Data Integration
Quality Assurance

We implemented a Data Integration and Data Migration solution using WebSphere Message Broker, MQ Series and Informatica tools.

Our custom solution substantially reduced time taken to record call details. This was achieved through:

A user-centric design created with Wipro’s understanding of a day-in-life scenario for a sales representative at our client.
Automating population of required information.
Removing need to search millions of database records.

We also implemented an end-to-end Testing framework. This was executed using model-based Testing using Wipro process automation tools. Using shift-left approach, we automated test case generation and execution from process maps.

The complexity of the overall engagement was high with multiple development streams running in parallel and continued monitoring and support required for several processes already in production.

Business Impact

The Lean program led to decommissioning of over 1000 applications over 5 years that helped in 14% portfolio reduction and savings of over £60 million.
The CRM Transformation helped reduce call entry time to less than 1 minute from 30 minutes. This, in turn, led to accurate and consistent reporting of sales activity and enhanced sales performance and its measurement.
The CRM Transformation project also provided a 360 degree view of customers between contact centers and the sales force. It enhanced sales force mobility by supporting the use of tablet devices.
Today, the new CRM system supports over 5000 sales representatives (from the original 300) and 2 languages. Being the most commonly performed task in the system, user satisfaction grew and led to high adoption.
Our Testing framework helped reduce cycle time by 20% and lowered Test case maintenance efforts by 30%.

Wipro has successfully executed over 300 projects for the client over the past 10 years and delivered £820,000 in savings.

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