Empowering Biotech SMEs towards efficient project management

How executive dashboards drive strategic decision making in pharma portfolio management

In the dynamic domain of pharmaceutical research and development, data is emerging as a lifeline where new innovations are transforming our lives every day. The pharmaceutical industry captures an enormous amount of data throughout the drug development process. According to McKinsey, impact of advanced analytics will drive between 15% and 30% improvement of EBIDTA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization) over the next five years climbing to EBIDTA improvements of between 45% and 70% over the next decade. Given the speed of advancements in the study and knowledge of diseases in today’s world, effective management and analysis of disease data has become the most important performance differentiator for innovative growth in the pharmaceutical industry. The quality and volume of new data collected from academic research, scientific discovery in disease analysis, and advances in pharmaceutical sciences, along with broader and more far-reaching data from epidemiological studies, clinical trial results and real-world evidence is huge. This data cannot be managed or analyzed solely using traditional methods. Pharma R&D organizations must learn to leverage digital aids to assemble this data volume in practical ways that increase their knowledge in diseases of interest and guide their investments in medicine and device therapies. Smart data engineering, business performance monitoring, project management, portfolio risk analysis, intuitive data visualizations, and executive dashboards are becoming an integral part of successful pharma R&D pipeline innovation and delivery. In this blog post, you will discover how decision dashboards play an important role in advancing pharma analytics, R&D project portfolio management and effective decision-making. Top-down, integrated analytic frameworks and dashboards will guide the future of pharmaceutical industry performance. We will explore how visualization and analysis tools should be tailored to meet the unique business growth objectives of strategic business analysts, commercial and R&D portfolio leaders, and corporate executives. For a successful innovative organization, strategic R&D portfolio management is a key factor to growth. Pharma R&D has a very long development cycle and requires the commitment of significant corporate resources to gain approval to market innovative medicine and device therapies. R&D portfolio management solutions help the enterprise control and optimize the value of their investments by analyzing and effectively navigating the risks in their R&D pipelines, and wisely positioning portfolio opportunities to maximize the potential benefit for the company and for their patients. The complexities in pharma portfolio management highlight the need for executive dashboards Diverse Pipeline Components Pharmaceutical companies may manage their R&D project portfolios from early-stage research through loss of exclusivity or by segmenting early-stage and late-stage development and in-line products. Either way you cut it, portfolio management demands alignment in key valuation metrics and the assembly of like for like data on timing, cost, revenue and risk data to effectively inform strategies and decisions. Marketing Dynamics In the highly competitive disease therapy market, portfolio managers analyze various dynamics such as regulatory shifts, research innovations, competitor pipeline advancements, and market trends to differentiate and promote the value of their products for patients. Risk Mitigation and Assessment Risk assessment in drug development accounts for the technical feasibility of demonstrating that a medicine or device delivers health improvements that meet or exceed a minimum criterion for the target product profile, on safety, efficacy, and stability. Beyond that, risk assessments should also account for the uncertainty in regulatory, competitive and commercial forecasts associated with delivering a product with a minimally viable commercial profile. Portfolio Performance Monitoring the performance of projects over time and evaluating them against their baseline, against other projects, or against industry benchmarks for assets at each stage of product development can be effectively achieved through a dynamic visual portfolio dashboard. The comparison analysis enabled by the visual interface can help put focus on performance trends and areas of risk to manage. Effective Decision Making With the ability to incorporate annotations, analytical insights, and rationales into dashboard charts and tables, portfolio investment options can be assessed with expert feedback, and the most viable portfolio development scenarios can be confidently pursued. Importance of Data Visualization in Pharma Portfolio Management The use of dashboards for pharma portfolio analytics drives the value of the organization´s information assets and offers advantage to gaining a competitive edge in a very competitive marketplace. Dashboards collect data from sources across the organization and present them in an interactive and insightful manner, helping executive decision makers access, analyze and act on important information effortlessly. Comprehensive View A holistic, accessible, and appealing visualization of a portfolio incorporates information from distinct data sources such as project delivery milestone timing; project cost and resource forecasts; technical and regulatory risk assessments; competitive landscape analysis; and market forecasts. When presented in an integrated dashboard, these data deliver greater project insights. Real-Time Analytics Integrated decision dashboard, enabled by real-time performance data, help facilitate well-informed decision-making processes. They source plan schedule updates, resource re-allocations, and market forecast adaptations due to competitive, regulatory and market events. These timely information dashboards provide a differentiating advantage for product positioning in a highly competitive industry. Cost Management Pharma Portfolio Executive Dashboard contribute to R&D cost management by efficiently signaling cost variance from baseline, assessing ROI for trial investment and optimizing cost forecasts and benchmarks for future management of trial cost and forecasting. Customization Portfolio management across the pharma industry has a common objective to drive sustained business growth but each organization has its own unique approach to governing its portfolio investment decisions. Subsequently, each organization measures portfolio performance and growth objectives based on the unique metrics and composition of their portfolios. To effectively interact with their portfolio knowledge base, these stakeholders require customized, yet frictionless interaction with their portfolio data, via personalized data dashboards, with data visualizations and insights customized to manage and respond to the elements most sensitive to sustained growth. Challenges in accomplishing Data Visualization for Data- Driven- Decision- Making From long and complex drug development cycles to fast evolving standards of care and an ever-dynamic market landscape, the pharmaceutical industry has a complex task of forecasting a successful and sustainable pipeline delivery of innovative medicine and device therapies over the next decade. Digital solutions such as data visualization and data dashboards improve clarity and actionable insights to effectively project and plan for a sustainable future with a robust and viable set of medicine and device projects at all stages of research and development. Data Disparity and data silos A core challenge that pharma and biotech companies are grappling with is data disparity. Due to the distributed nature of pharma R&D planning and execution, data is captured and maintained in different systems and in varying formats and structures throughout the project lifecycle. Maintaining data standards across systems may not be a priority for the various project data contributors and therefore it may be challenging to assure data quality and to align and join project data for portfolio analysis. This makes it difficult for the portfolio decision makers to get a reliable, consolidated view of all their project data. Manual data assembly demands patience, is error prone, and may not yield insights in a timeframe that a decision maker requires. Need for Centralized Portfolio-level Visualizations A crucial step in data-driven-decision-making is the ability to analyze multiple dimensions of complex project data and to make informed decisions. Dashboards and visualizations can be of immense help in bringing clarity and insight into the performance and options available to optimize a project’s development path. The ability to assess one or many projects in the portfolio, to visualize and contrast projects and development options across the portfolio, and to offer clear insights to investment choices for decision-makers is a significant advantage. As a pioneer in pharma data analytics and visualizations, team i2e engineered Clairvoyance- a custom Executive Dashboard Application tailored specifically for the pharmaceutical industry. This application offers a consolidated view of the client's project portfolio, providing executives with a powerful interactive tool for data-driven decision-making. This custom solution delivers a robust data quality verification platform and offers the analysis and visualization features needed to tackle the various problems the client was experiencing. The Clairvoyance custom dashboard platform can help the R&D leaders to align portfolio performance with their business goals. i2e Consulting helps global pharmaceutical companies to access insights and prepare decision dashboards tailored to their unique business requirements. Embrace the power of Clairvoyance, a cutting-edge decision management solution. Contact us now and seize the future of pharmaceutical innovation by optimizing, strategizing, and thriving with Clairvoyance. Reference: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/life-sciences/our-insights/how-pharma-can-accelerate-business-impact-from-advanced-analytics

Data Visualization Solutions | Services | Custom Dashboard

Digitalization led to big data which by 2020 will have 44 trillion gigabytes of data. We are in a position where we have access to masses of data, but our ability to effectively use this data for competitive advantage is a constraint. The reason being most of this data is unstructured and scattered across multiple sources. Did you know that only 1% of the data we have access to is analyzed? This is a massive underutilization of data which is not free. Data is helmed as the new age gold and if you are planning to become data rich you should invest in Data Visualization. Data visualization has been around for centuries and evolving constantly. From primitive maps to visualizing data in mixed reality visual representation of data has come a long way. Visualization makes it easier to process and comprehend data. As they say, “A picture tells a story better than 1000 words could” Data visualization can be used at different levels across an organization and there are several used cases. One thing to consider while going for visualization is to have a clear objective whether you want it for exploring the data or mere presentation of data. Data Exploration is used by a data analyst who is trying to match patterns, get insights, make a forecast, etc. These usually require dashboards, multi-layer graphs, etc. Data exploration is used by many businesses to get actionable business insights into their data and plan the next steps. On the other hand, data presentation is to represent the findings of data exploration in a very basic form, usually some form of storytelling. You would not want your investors or higher management to spend time understanding the graphs and charts or worse not understanding them at all. We at i2e consulting offer data visualization to help get actional business insights and PPM solutions. Here we list a few of our many customized data visualization solutions that hugely benefit organizations. Data Exploration in R&D: We created dashboards for a pharmaceutical giant who wanted to get insights on the research and development happening around their organization. They wanted these dashboards to drug lifecycle management. Our dashboards helped R&D productivity to newer heights through complete data integration and cross-departmental data utilization. Interactive mixed-reality PPM dashboards: One of our clients came with a unique requirement wherein they wanted their board meetings to be interesting. They wanted the entire top management to be involved, focused and attentive. We suggested and eventually created data visualization with Microsoft HoloLens. AR/VR is highly engaging, informative and unique (well for now it is) which makes it ideal for presenting information. The holographic imaging enabled them to interact and play around with their data. This newly found perspective not only made the meeting interesting but also enabled better insights for better forecasting. Resourcing Dashboards: Resource planning is one of the key concerns for many organizations because of the nature of the information involved. When one of our clients, requested a dashboard to optimize scheduling and resources precisely. We offered a dashboard solution to minimized resource planning challenges. The dashboard showed resource availability based on skillset, level of expertise that helped with resource availability forecast. Besides, it also showed FTE scores of resources and made the company audit-ready. Wrapping it up, in the age of big data analytics data visualization is the only way to harness information. If you are planning to invest in it, do have a clear objective because these tools do not come cheap. If you are looking for any data visualization solution, we at i2e consulting are ready to answer your queries. Just fill in the below form.

Organizing Data for Portfolio Decision Making | i2e Consulting

Did you know that 60 - 73% data of an organization are categorized as Dark Data, which goes to waste1? 2020, Gartner survey on portfolio decision-making finds that 78%2 of R&D leaders say the pressure to make faster decisions has increased. All you need is harness your data for insights and make decisions faster. If only it were that easy; or is it? In today’s blog we will discuss business problems in the life science space, technical hurdles, and how with a good approach and even better execution you could master quicker decision making.Business and technology challenges Businesses are rapidly evolving; the amount of data volume is exponentially increasing yet; companies are still spending hours and hours in PowerPoint report generation? There has been an increase in scrutiny in portfolio decision-making by leaders. A lack of agility and transparency is imperative. The multi-country, multi-vendor Pharma environment is not helping either. If you zoom in to these problems, often it is observed that a common set of system challenges are present in most organizations struggling with portfolio decision-making. (While there are change and process issues; however, for this blog we will limit ourselves to technical problems.) Disparate data sources and systems are a major concern which hinders business collaboration, leaving room for inefficiencies, vulnerability, and overspending. This siloed information and a lack of visibility for BI (Business Intelligence) and analytics lead to poor decision-making. Companies have been aggressively increasing data collection and analysis over the years; however, most of it suffers from data quality issues such as inaccurate, incomplete, inconsistent, and duplicated information. This unstructured or raw data is called bad data, it is bad news for any company, and it does more harm than good. Not only does bad data lead to flawed insights, but it also creates bottlenecks in digital transformation, many migration projects have failed owing to bad data. It also affects operational efficiencies. Sadly, most companies think it is a minor issue until it becomes a major bottleneck for them to deal with. The ability to react to the market depends on how quickly you have access to the latest insights. However, most companies work on week- or month-old data. How is someone to make faster decisions when the analysis is based on such old data? This also puts them at a disadvantage against their competitors. Your approach matters No problem is big enough with the right approach. Identifying loopholes that affect your performance is key here. A thorough evaluation with cross-functional stakeholders and subject matter experts is the first step. Once you have run the analysis you are to define the problems and work towards finding solutions. It is advisable to have clear quantifiable goals. That is where consultants come in place. Once you have the plan ready you can move to prototype stage followed by the actual solution implementation. Let us consider a case, the race to the cloud has left many a system scattered in on-premises, hybrid, and cloud-based environments. Costing heavily on operation efficiencies and at times poses serious threats to data integrity. How to take informed decisions with multiple selections from a set of alternatives while taking account of relevant constraints, preferences, and uncertainties? Approach to this can be: Define the problem at hand with a thorough assessment. System review and identifying data sources form part of this step.Once we are aware of the problem at hand, we work towards enlisting solutions. In this case, Unifying data across organizations by connecting these disparate systems would be a smart way forward.Next up is the implementation. Once solutions have been finalized, with a comprehensive set of frameworks, technical solution, and analytics we build portfolio decision making capability. In the recently concluded Planisware Exchange22, i2e presented working solution to make decision making faster. If you are an existing Planisware customer or planning to invest in Planisware these solutions could be just the thing you need. Real-time data exchange Planisware supports OData from version V6.2 onwards; however, you do need a separate license for it. In a survey independently conducted by i2e Consulting it was found that few users were aware of it. OData or SQL of the web as it is popularly known, allows organizations to extract Realtime Planisware data. This is useful to integrate Planisware with other systems or perform additional analysis of Planisware data. It is easy to use even for business users and requires no external application. Planisware Data Extractor facilitates users to retrieve real-time data from applications, so one need not go to a report every time they need information. Everything happens in Excel, so it is easy to customize the charts, do additional calculations and combine data from other sources. Automating portfolio reporting with RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to generate and distribute portfolio reports. The solution assists project teams to deliver actionable portfolio data to leaders efficiently. With just a few clicks, select the data you need to build your presentations or Gantt charts and get the report delivered to your email address. No need to waste time manually exporting data into slide decks and Gantt chart templates. Explore possibilities in portfolio decision-making for clinical development. The good assessment exercise sets clear understanding of business pain points and expectations. This helps develop KPIs, data sets for reporting, and dashboards. Forecasting and demand planning for resources. Listed are a few portfolio decision dashboards. Budgeting analysis by site and spending by vendor and CROOperational KPI (key performance indicators) tracking of numerous studies.Areas of under-utilization and over-utilization of resourcesMilestone tracking and predicting deviations from timelineCompliance with regulatory requirements for time reportingTalent upskilling and management To conclude, the right approach with proper planning is half the battle won. The ancient wisdom of haste makes waste stand valid even today. As Planisware integration partner, i2e Consulting helps organisations gain project visibility with unified view of portfolio. Slice and dice information to discover trends, practical solutions and prioritize demand. To learn more about our Planisware offerings visit our service page, or fill in the form below. Think PPM, think i2e Consulting. References Harnessing Dark Data - themedicinemaker.com/business-regulation/harnessing-dark-data2020 Gartner portfolio decision making during disruption survey