Efficiency and compliance are two critical components in highly-regulated industries, especially when it comes to developing drugs and medical devices. Unfortunately, though, these are two areas in which many life sciences companies struggle and could significantly improve through IT solutions.
A new report by Veeva, a leader in life sciences cloud applications, released the results of a new survey on the management of commercial content across the digital supply chain, which includes tasks such as the creation, approval, distribution, and withdrawal of content.
The findings conclude that life sciences companies overwhelmingly use manual methods (paper/e-mail) and multiple systems to manage these activities, causing inefficiencies, non-compliance, and dissatisfied users.
Key Findings:
- Most respondents (89%) say they rely upon multiple systems and methods to manage commercial content.
- More than half (60%) rely on email to complete at least one or more tasks such as review and approval, or content distribution, while 41% still use paper-based processes for certain functions.
- Majorities lack key capabilities to drive speed to market, including the ability to report on content status and process bottlenecks (85%), to reuse assets and materials via a global digital asset management system (70%), and to electronically distribute approved content to multiple channels (60%).
- Respondents also report they lack key capabilities for compliance, including reports on where claims and content are in use (81%) and an audit trail to manage commercial content throughout its lifecycle (49%).
- Few (6%) use an end-to-end commercial content management system. Respondents expressed higher satisfaction (88% to 100%) with a number of key capabilities as compared to respondents using email, paper, or other systems to manage commercial content (45% to 66%).
- A majority of respondents say the use of an end-to-end commercial content management system would speed time to market for content (73%) and improve compliance (52%).
With the cost of product development and time-to-market increasing and global regulatory requirements constantly changing, the need to streamline business operations is paramount. For companies who haven’t experienced what some of the newer technologies offer, it’s time to take a look. Today’s solutions have the ability to match the innovation you bring to improving the lives of patients.
