Faster Time to Market in the Pharmaceutical Industry
Global Pharmaceutical Companies
The Story
The Challenge
Pre-COVID trends in pharma already suggested that, to curb the rise of drug prices, companies would need to reduce R&D costs just as they had reduced sales and marketing spend. Overlay the new reality and the quest to get drugs to market faster, and the ability to stay competitive is paramount. The question for the industry: how do you "lean out" the R&D cycle while increasing speed to market? Agile ways of working — proven well beyond software — are shown to accelerate time to market through a more collaborative, customer-focused drug life cycle, a focus on designing for efficiency, and a shift in management mindset.
Our Approach
ADAPTOVATE's Agile ways of working framework increases speed to market through proven approaches across seven primary dimensions. This was applied across two pharmaceutical client engagements:
Designing for efficiency in compliance-heavy R&D
A global research-based pharmaceutical company wanted to assess whether Agile could be adopted by its compliance-heavy R&D teams. ADAPTOVATE mapped their R&D Solution Delivery Life Cycle, identified where security checks and approvals were needed, and then centralized and aggregated regulation requirements and security checks — reducing the documentation and approvals needed at each stage so teams could work in an Agile fashion while ensuring compliance, security and regulatory adherence without limiting pace.
Scaling Agile across the enterprise
A regional affiliate of a large global pharmaceutical company was scaling Agile to become nimbler and more efficient. ADAPTOVATE facilitated executive leadership workshops to define the work and capabilities needed, then created a fit-for-purpose scaled organizational design — aligning leadership, management and Tribes to strategic initiatives, removing information silos, and grouping capabilities to streamline roles to fewer than 50 across the organization.
Results & Impact
Outcomes
The Agile test on a heavily regulated team enabled the client to double the scope of Agile-eligible teams, scaling from 6 to 50 teams in just 3 months, with 4x faster delivery for patient applications and a 20% reuse of datasets for drug-discovery algorithms — leading to more novel therapeutic compounds for testing and faster, more efficient clinical trials. For the enterprise-scaling client, the new fit-for-purpose design simplified roles threefold, built strong common ownership of business outcomes, and reduced communication silos and inefficiencies at every level.
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