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

System Provider Assessment and Selection

By admin,

A major global biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing life-changing therapies decided to evaluate available system options for a new global pricing and revenue management system. They wanted to make the right decision if they should develop or buy a new platform that fits their strategy and improves their decision-making process. The organization looked for a partner to work with the business and technology team during this early project phase and provide thought leadership and guidance to select and assess the future pricing platform.

Approach:

Together with the business project lead, we developed a robust selection process and assessment criteria and established exact briefing materials for the potential vendors. We organized initial presentation meetings with the vendors to provide insights and industry experience as part of their RFP pitch. As a subject matter expert, we created in-depth criteria and a criteria weighing system. Besides, we analyzed the provided supplier’s information, comparing system functionalities and vendor capabilities in terms of innovation, functionalities, deliverables, and value. We performed expert interviews with pricing executives from other pharma companies and assessed client references to collect further insights on their current platform implementations experience, best practices, and recommendations.

Impact:

Our expertise in pricing and revenue management and cloud platform implementation and selection experience delivered an excellent solution fitting to the individual, organizational needs. The client benefited greatly from our deep engagement in the requirements and selection process and the management between potential vendors, business, and technology executives at all levels.

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