The challenge
Our customer, a large pharmaceutical, was managing their approved vendor list through emails, meeting notes, and spreadsheets. The gathering and management of accumulated cost and performance evaluations were:
- Manual
- Decentralized
- Prone to error
- Unreportable
- Expensive
The team responsible for project resource management included 25 individuals across administrators, functional area representatives, and voting members. This group managed suppliers and vendors across multiple research and development (R&D) functions.
They reached out to Point B to build a better approach to vendor management. We went one step further to introduce automated workflows and advanced analytics.
The opportunity
Our customer’s vendor portfolio accounted for hundreds of million dollars each year. They need a tech-enabled way to manage costs and quality across a complex ecosystem of vendors. Vendor types varied greatly across contract research organizations (CROs), including patient recruiters, laboratories, technologies, supplies, and more. All vendors supporting clinical trials were high cost and came with added risks. It was unacceptable for vendors to fall short as this would negatively impact timelines, operations, and ultimately, revenue.
We started by gaining an understanding of current process by completing a full evaluation, determining that it took 17.9 days from submitting a vendor evaluation to voting completion, a required final step before contracting.
After the initial assessment, we recommended incorporating efficiencies where possible and implementing a strategy to enable end-to-end resource evaluation, including forecasting abilities for themselves and their CROs.
Our approach
Point B recommended using Microsoft Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Dataverse) to create a system of record and vendor management interface. Knowing the data output would only be as rich and insightful as the team’s inputs, our first priority was to build a product that was easily used and adopted by the team. We were able to simplify a previously complex process with a simplified, intuitive interface that supported a clear path to usability.
Ensuring a positive, user-friendly interface and experience meant:
- Standardizing all fields and data points.
- Creating functional profiles and internal alignment around roles in the workflows.
- Enabling vendor voting workflows, including automated reminders and consolidation of inputs across user types.
- Ability for users to submit, cancel, and review requests in a dashboard view.
Keeping the end reporting in mind as we built the platform provided immediate value to users. The customer’s data and reporting needs were critical to a successful vendor management approach. We ensured our customer could answer the following questions quickly to reduce overall clinical trial risk:
Which vendor am I using and how often?
- How many times have we used this vendor?
- How much are we spending in a category or with a certain vendor?
- How many and which clinical trials are they involved in?
How do we maintain the quality of our portfolio?
- How satisfied is our team with a vendor or set of vendors?
- Do we need to find a higher-quality, more reliable vendor for supplies?
Where is there risk in the portfolio?
- Are we relying on a single vendor for a critical capability?
- Is there redundancy for critical clinical trial supplies?
Project results
This tool has reduced time from vendor request submission to final outcomes by 55%. At go-live, the average number of calendar days from submission to outcome was 17.9. Ten months later, it was reduced to just 8.45 days. That means teams are engaging and contracted with suppliers an average of 10 days earlier than before this project was completed.
And in the world of clinical trials, saved time can be worth millions of dollars a day.
Other customer-reported outcomes:
Increased visibility and speed
- Alphabetizing the drop-down lists streamlined assignment of tasks. Previously, teams had to search by email and hope to find the right information.
- Submitters have increased visibility and added functionality ensures they know where their submission is and have control over it.
- Allowed submitters to see the vendor dashboard.
- Approval notifications sent to the outsourcing team to allow them to award suppliers the study and begin work on contractual SOWs.
Eliminated excessive administrative tasks
- Automated reminders for late responses.
- Automated vote counting by function and voter profile.
- Assignment of functional alignment and voters is nearly instantaneous where it used to take up to a minute and a half.
Self-service and agency
- Users can track their own submissions and follow-up accordingly.
- Submitters can cancel requests up until the final outcome
- Consolidated voting buttons in a single location to provide outcomes in a timely process.
Point B puts people at the center of change, deploying change management strategies that are tailored to fit the unique needs of your organization’s workforce. We identify and engage change champions with best-in-class training strategies that spearhead adoption across global user populations. Get in touch with us here.
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