Improving the Value
of the Strategic Planning Process

By admin,

A major global biopharmaceutical organization realized the need to improve the value obtained from their annual strategic-planning process. As part of this mindset, they believed that the new strategic planning process should support real-time strategy making and facilitate innovation and creative initiatives. The company reached out to Aurynion and asked for support to directly assist the Corporate Strategy Group designing and implementing the new global strategic planning model.

Approach:

An essential starting point of this project was to determine the common overarching goals. We managed to build and prepare the executive minds and make sure that the decision-makers have a solid understanding of the business and the strategy’s assumptions. Along with the Corporate Strategic Group, we identified the critical issues related to the past year’s process supporting the corporate team to manage top-down initiatives aligned with finance and business areas.

Impact:

By creating a new process flow, tangible milestones, and a clear action plan, we managed to prepare the executive team for a real-time strategic plan discussion in the year ahead. The business stakeholders and business units could deliver their strategic suggestions and financial impact cases on time and based on a fair vetting process. We improved the cumbersome process in recent years and dramatically reduced the impact on Strategy Aggregation and the Finance Team responsible for creating the overall Business Case and P&L impact. We created enough lead time for the board meeting so that the core team was able to aggregate findings and assumptions into an appropriate and detailed executive decision document.

Best practices delivered:

    We identified the following best practices during this initiative:

  • Excel in driving individual stream activities and deliverables
  • Exceed on project governance and change management activities
  • Identify concrete milestones and timelines for the Strategic Planning Calendar
  • Execute and act on a concrete road map
  • Excel in cross-functional collaboration among multiple business units
  • Deliver a robust board presentation and strategic long-range plan

Implementation of a
Global Pricing System

By admin,

A journey to agile pricing analytics and revenue management: How organizations can become faster, more precise, and more responsive to revenue leakage.

Situation:

A major Life Science and Pharmaceutical company wanted to elevate pricing decisions, available pricing, access information, and seize opportunities faster.

The company envisioned to enhance the strategic decision-making capability in pricing and market access to achieve further commercial success for inline and pipeline products, optimize price governance, and enable local entrepreneurship. The executives decided to implement a best in class pricing and reimbursement management platform to achieve this ambitious goal. With this platform, the executives expected to increase the company’s global pricing capabilities significantly.

To achieve this, they reached out to Aurynion for support in planning, managing, and rolling-out this innovative global pricing platform. Some of the benefits expected with the implementation of this new platform were the following:

  • Supporting successful launches
  • Integrating commercial targets into decision-making
  • Empowering local country entrepreneurship through reliable pricing and reimbursement resources
  • Strengthening the company’s external competitive focus
  • Creating a single “point of truth” to all information needed for strategic decision making
Our Approach:

For this extensive project, we were responsible for interacting with internal stakeholders from various global business units, the external system vendor, internal IT teams, developing a feasible overall project plan, and ensuring the alignment of all workstreams for the project’s success.

As a starting point, we applied a structured interview methodology to assess key activities within several business functions to identify business requirements and assess its current pricing system and governance process. Adopting an agile project methodology, we developed the necessary business requirements and used them for prioritizing rules during the implementation.

While the company decided on an off-the-shelf system, we were still required to enable adjustments and customizations based on business needs and data requirements. We established a robust data integration strategy, went through a detailed data cleanup exercise, established a robust testing approach. We built and designed the training deck and materials for the roll-out in more than 140 countries and 250 users and implemented a change management and adoption strategy. The roll-out was delivered in several waves based on priority and business impact.

Impact:

Overall, the project was a great success. The new global pricing and reimbursement platform involved more than 40 products, 140 countries, 250 users, enabling the organization to drive strategic pricing decisions and deliver commercial success for inline and pipeline products. Plus, we delivered more than 1.5 months ahead of schedule and under budget.

The new platform allowed decentralized pricing decisions in more than 80% of the cases leading to significant time savings and speeded up the pricing decision making across regions. The system optimized the pricing approval process and generated data storage and pricing evaluation documents in a single platform (with no more long email chains).

With faster price decision-making, affiliates could act as local entrepreneurs and implement early price negotiations with local authorities. A pricing analytics system integrated with other internal and external data also delivered:

  • Consolidated pricing and reimbursement summaries for the whole portfolio
  • Integrated competitor prices in the market and future product launches
  • Real-time pricing and reimbursement monitoring dashboard and reports
  • Detailed pricing data flows and global pricing governance
  • Revenue optimization through real-time IRP portfolio simulations
  • Correlations for international referencing pricing by indication across markets
  • Evaluation of potential price change impact on global revenue

The company achieved superior pricing and revenue management by further enabling the client’s internal resources and capabilities.

Best Practices:

We identified the following best practices during this initiative:

  • Archive old pricing data for future historical analysis
  • Enable more strategic pricing decisions, allowing faster decisions and enhancing local entrepreneurship
  • Improve governance and enable better pricing analysis results
  • Access to price and reimbursement for reference countries to mitigate price erosion risks and prepare for the future launch products
  • Strengthen competitor price visibility
  • Allow more transparent access to pricing and reimbursement decisions to key stakeholders for a better planning process

Enabling organizational growth

By admin,

An innovative and research-driven Life Science organization sought significant revenue growth and a new organizational setup to transform and eliminate non-value-added activities. With the expected new organizational design, the company looked for opportunities to reduce costs, identify growth drivers, strengthen short-term performance, and improve long-term organizational health. The organization looked for a partner to support this large-scale organizational transformation program across multiple project workstreams.

Impact:

During this project, we managed an end-to-end organizational transformation and design project, including the implementation of a consolidated work plan.

As part of the project, we established individual workstreams and several governance meetings with the executive management team.

Overall, we implemented the new organizational strategy splitting the organization of more than 20,000 employees into three vertically integrated business units and adjusting the operational structure.

A new business partner approach with HR, Legal, and other vital business functions proved an excellent approach for the new organization to avoid disruption during this early phase of the disintegration. Following the new design, we developed and adjusted guiding principles, governance setup, and structured communication plans. In our collaboration with global Human Resources Teams and the newly assigned Business Partners, we also fast-paced the employee data cleaning process and defined new roles during the selection and alignment process.

Best practices:

We identified the following best practices during this initiative:

  • Excel in driving individual stream activities and deliverables
  • Focus on project governance and change activities
  • Achieve buy-in from key stakeholders
  • Build a Business Partner Approach to avoid business disruption

Assessment for Improved
Customer Service

By admin,

A medium-sized IT-Service Company encountered many organizational and internal process issues preventing them from achieving their strategic of recent years goals to provide strong customer orientation.

The organization encountered several issues in its Business Development, Sales, and Operations departments while attempting to take on new business.

The Management Team was deeply involved in the day-to-day business operations and managing operational crises rather than advancing the company’s overall strategy and concentrating on business development and sales expansion.

The organization’s executives reached out to Aurynion for support in assessing their business operation and processes and finding improvements, prioritizing the optimization areas, and developing robust action plans and a roadmap to implement the approved changes.

Our Methodology:

As an initial step, we conducted several interviews with management using a structured interview methodology to assess key activities with several business functions. We also conducted individual key team members interviews to identify and assess the company’s strengths and improvement areas. During our in-depth review of the business, we identified and prioritized improvement areas, and their benefit potential through data, best practices and interviews. Using these results, we developed the “to-be” situation to achieve project goals:

  • Redesigned Account Management activities to achieve greater product diversification and increased cross-selling opportunities
  • Optimized client segmentation structure to redirect the limited resources towards key clients and to increase customer retention and satisfaction
  • Defined and clarified roles and responsibilities.
  • Improved Governance and Project Risk Management in daily operations
  • Identified complexity reduction and transparency increase in relevant business areas, e.g., Customer Service, Business Development, Commercial, etc.
  • Developed a realistic and detailed activity and implementation roadmap, including action plans
Impact:

Our solid methodologies and the delivered solution was a successful achievement for their client base. The key client accounts saw a much faster response to their service inquiries due to increased customer service quality and process improvements.

A different and more individualized focus on key clients created higher customer satisfaction, customer intimacy, and an increase in the company’s revenues.

New client onboarding could be done much faster, and the revenue stream was realized earlier than before. Internally, internal crises have decreased, and employees were more engaged due to clear roles & responsibilities and tasks they have to accomplish.

Finally, employee satisfaction and retention have increased due to overall improvements in the organization.

Pricing Strategy and Tactics

By admin,

Aurynion LLC gathered SmartCEO Future 50 winners in New York to discuss best practices in pricing strategy and tactics. The participating executives shared how they chose their current pricing model, how their pricing strategy differs from their competition, and discussed how to ensure the pricing process remains realistic and value driven.

  • How much should your cost basis influence your price?
  • What differentiates your pricing model from the competition?
  • How did you choose your current pricing model?
  • How often do you review your pricing model to ensure it remain realistic and value-driven?
  • What other factors do/did you consider for setting once for your products and/or services?
  • Who is involved in setting the price for a product in your organization?
  • ‘Premium Service’ Pricing – a way to improve margins?
  • What best practices and what challenges do you see in terms of pricing?
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