Leveraging EPM in the Life Sciences Industry

How are cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) solutions helping companies in the Life Sciences industry address the challenges they face and take advantage of new market opportunities to drive growth and profits?

Challenges in Dynamic Markets

Companies in the Life Sciences industry are facing major challenges. On the positive side, aging populations, chronic/lifestyle diseases, emerging-market expansion, and treatment and technology advances are driving growth in the Life Sciences sector.  However, efforts by governments, health care providers, and health plans to reduce costs, improve outcomes, and demonstrate value are dramatically altering the health care demand and delivery landscape.

Deloitte’s 2015 Life Sciences Industry Outlook Report reported that “it is becoming increasingly evident that the global Life Sciences sector is operating in an era of significant transformation. A dynamically changing clinical, regulatory, and business landscape is requiring that pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and medical technology companies adapt traditional research and development (R&D), pricing, supply chain, and commercial models.”

Despite these challenges, Deloitte believes that the global Life Sciences industry still has the potential for significant growth. It’s up to each organization to determine how it can build and sustain new strategic business models. Those focusing on operational and financial performance are quickly becoming the most agile of organizations. They’re also, as a result, set up for long-term success.

Enter Cloud-Based Enterprise Performance Management

Leading Life Sciences companies are turning to cloud-based EPM software to help address many of the challenges outlined above.  Here are several ways that cloud-based EPM software can help Life Sciences companies survive and thrive in a dynamic and demanding industry:

• Effective Budgeting & Planning – Cloud-based budgeting and planning software enables Life Sciences companies to create more dynamic budgets and rolling forecasts that can be updated in real-time based on changing business drivers. The modeling portion of the software enables business analysts and financial analysts to model different business scenarios.
• Streamlining Financial Close and Reporting – Cloud-based consolidation and reporting solutions enable Finance departments to spend less time collecting data and more time analyzing results – before they’re delivered to internal and external stakeholders.  In addition, the results can be delivered faster through standard reports, an Excel-based interface, and presentations and board books that can be automated to eliminate rekeying of information and improve accuracy.
• Scorecarding – Getting Everyone on the Same Page – Web-based scorecarding is helping Life Sciences companies create clear metrics that can be shared and monitored across the entire organization. Scorecards allow each employee within a Life Sciences company to clearly understand the key drivers to profitability while providing employees the ability to track their performance against company goals.
• Dashboards – Delivering Timely Insights – Executive dashboards serve as the shop window to the business for key executives. The window provides graphs and charts on how the business is performing at any given moment. A dashboard can provide a summary of sales by region, R&D costs, drug development and approval progress, operating costs by region, and other metrics.

Real-World Customer Examples

In this white paper, we document how several companies – Physio Controls, Tandem Diabetes Care, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals – are using Planful Cloud EPM Suite to improve their agility in the dynamic Life Sciences market.  This includes a summary of the business challenges faced by these companies, how they deployed the software, and the benefits they have achieved.

To learn more about how Planful is helping companies in the Life Sciences industry to navigate dynamic markets, download the free white paper.