Organizations across the life sciences industry are faced with five key pressures in 2019, including lowering costs and improving financial performance. While there are many ways to achieve these objectives, we recommend considering three proven methods:

1. Digital Transformation: Explore and implement digital tools to automate inefficient manual processes and provide data-driven insights to improve employee experiences and drive customer engagement.
2. Better Ways of Working: Optimize your operating model to complement your transformation initiatives and better serve both internal and external customers.
3. Customer Centricity: Design empathy-led solutions that meet end user needs, not wants, to deliver impactful results.

Below we discuss how these solutions can benefit your organization.

Digital Transformation

Digital transformation isn’t a new concept. Many organizations have already begun or are just beginning their transformation journeys, and there are many areas of the business where companies can integrate digital tools – R&D, supply chain, and across corporate functions. But, transformation is about more than just technology. In order for these initiatives to succeed:

• They need a clear strategy that aligns with the overall objectives of the transformation.
• The foundational vision, mission, and objectives of the initiatives must be aligned from the top down.
• There must be a defined use case for how the digital tools and technologies will help drive down costs or improve financial performance in order to realize the benefits of the strategy.
• A detailed change management plan must be in place to ensure adoption.

For example, if a company’s objective is to lower costs within commercial operations, they may implement an AI tool to decrease the time it takes to develop and deploy marketing content. From planning through execution, they will engage key stakeholders, from leadership down to end users, defining change impact strategies as early on as possible to promote widespread adoption of the change. A robust strategy such as this will accelerate a digital transformation and enable companies to quickly realize the benefits and build on that momentum.

Better Ways of Working

Rather than developing and implementing new ways of working and reactively measuring impact, companies can make proactive, fast, and meaningful improvements in strategically important business areas by pioneering better ways of working.

Traditionally, companies start by identifying the “right” behaviors, then persuading employees to adopt them to reap the benefits. We recommend an alternative approach, which encourages employees to be creative, flexible, and agile. Our Results Acceleration Projects (RAPs) help employees discover and implement better ways of working that rapidly lead to improvements in business-critical initiatives. RAPs leverage the characteristics of crises – or must-do situations – to nudge project team members out of their comfort zones to find better ways of working and achieve major improvements in business performance, including lower costs and improved financial performance. Employees are more likely to identify the pain points that affect their performance and the solutions that will work best in their day-to-day execution. This approach encourages adoption and enables quick wins through long-term benefits.

Customer Centricity

Empathy-led techniques serve to shift a company’s mindset from product to customer centric. An empathetic mindset can address root issues and implement solutions that will more effectively improve business performance, mitigate risk, and positively impact customers (e.g. patients, physicians, etc.).

However, according to PwC, only 38 percent of U.S. consumers say the employees they interact with understand their needs. Defining the customer, identifying their needs, and designing internal- or external-facing solutions can be a gamechanger for life sciences organizations, as business outcomes are directly linked to “customer” outcomes. When customers’ needs are met, it leads to better engagement and loyalty and, ultimately, increased revenue.

If your organization is facing pressure to lower costs and improve financial performance, we can work with you to explore the options available to maximize your ROI and achieve your business goals, including those discussed above. To learn more, please feel free to contact me directly at rkane@navigatecorp.com or 484-383-0606.

Sources:

– https://www.pwc.com/us/en/services/consulting/library/consumer-intelligence-series/future-of-customer-experience.html
– https://hbr.org/2018/10/6-ways-to-build-a-customer-centric-culture