Overview
The main goal of the pharmaceutical industry is to provide drugs that prevent infections, maintain health and cure diseases. The global pharmaceutical industry is estimated to be worth $1 trillion. Of this, North America contributes about 40% and Europe about 28%.
The industry has made great strides in the past few decades, finding cures and means to control a large number of infections and diseases. Thanks to a continued rise in chronic illnesses, life-style related illnesses and an aging world population, the opportunity for pharmaceutical companies continues to grow.
There is a wide variety of companies operating in the pharmaceutical industry spanning the entire value chain.
Challenges
Regardless of the type of organization, there are a number of challenges that organizations working in the pharmaceutical industry are facing. Here are just some of the issues that are common across the industry.
- Compliance and Legal issues: There are a large number of regulatory agencies that govern the industry. These range from good manufacturing practices, local and environmental clearances, all the way to weaving through the complex web of Intellectual property and related claims.
- Pricing: Many countries tightly regulate the prices of drugs leading to severe pressure on margins. This is especially true for off-patent or generic drugs. The industry needs to watch over costs without losing sight of compliance and quality issues. Unfortunately, many companies do not have clear visibility and detailed cost models to help them.
- Long product life-cycles: The process of new drug discovery is extremely complex and has low productivity. There is no simple way to shorten the life-cycle, meaning the existing and proposed portfolio has to be managed really well in order to maintain a sustainable business.
- Marketing challenges: The end products of the pharmaceutical industry are sold through physicians and hospitals, so the conventional marketing channels cannot be leveraged as in the other industries. Also, with a lot of awareness among patients and physicians, large pharmaceutical companies have to be really wary of claims of abusing their market position.
Solutions
PMSoft has been working with global pharmaceutical companies across the value chain for over 13 years and understands these challenges. Here are some of the ways in which PMSoft has been helping Pharma companies.
- Concept to Commercialization: PMSoft helps map the end-to-end process for Product development. We understand that the business makes money on products and the entire focus is maintained on the product – not the project. Many companies make the error of assuming that tight project management will yield results. It doesn’t. Each product is unique and the stages needed to manage it needs to be unique as well.
- Central Product Office: PMSoft has pioneered the notion of Central Product Office, which essentially manages the entire product portfolio for the business. Making up the CPO are product managers who shepherd the products all the way from the R&D Labs to the Commercial scale operations. They act as product champions and make sure that the buck is not passed in inter-function battles.
- Knowledge Management and Dashboards: PMSoft has the expertise to suggest and implement the IT systems at the backend of the development process to help build a knowledge repository for the organization. Also, it gives the executive management access to dashboards with real time visibility into the development projects.
- What is your specific concern/challenge? Let us know and we shall work on it together.