Many Animal Health and Life Science organizations haven’t yet fully embraced Data Governance and realized the value this critical function plays in ensuring data is fit for purpose, fit for use to drive business value. This includes attempting to implement innovative new solutions to be more competitive in the marketplace. In these instances, some do not take the additional steps to ensure seamless integration into their respective complex eco-system or have the right strategic partner to help them successfully realize the value.
Areas such as Product Hierarchy, Material Master, Customer Master, Parent Child Relationships, Bill to, Ship To, Sales, Rebates, and Incentives require orchestration between numerous systems. The list of topics and supporting systems adds layers of complexity and inter-relationship between these respective systems and subsequent transformations of the data from these systems can be daunting to plan for.
When engaged by organizations to address their data issues, we find several that have their field sales teams using Excel files to manually track and calculate their performance and reluctant or unwilling to leverage their CRM and subsequent systems reports as they do not trust the data. This approach compounds the issue as in many cases the field force stops entering data into systems and thus creates massive downstream problems The knock-on effect of this is lower customer satisfaction (internal & external) and less confidence in the data that drives executive decision making. Evaluating the success of new product launches, the market impact of promotional programs, and the ability to accurately allocate field force are negatively impacted.
One best practice we highly recommend is to bring together Data Governance, business, IT and your strategic vendor partner leaders in the planning stages of the project to have a seat at the table to plan for a successful implementation of your critical initiative. This key step brings all of the collective experience together and identifies the needed data elements to be planned for and executed.
The need for a robust and effective Data Governance program cannot be overstated. This team is critical to work across the respective functions and groups in partnership with your strategic vendor partner to successfully address data quality, data ingestion, data transformations need to provide robust field and leadership performance. C&F has a long history of providing strategic value to assist organizations to fully realize the value of their respective data sets. After all, you don’t want your sales reps thinking they have to do their own data management activities to be successful.
For further insights, also read:
Data lake in the pharmaceutical industry: 5 things to keep in mind to get it right
Data Lake: Agile, Unstructured, but Governed and Controlled
From Insights to Impact: How to Drive Animal Health and Human Well-being with Data
How to restore effective sales in animal pharma ensuring high quality and reliability of data
