Highlights
- Pharma companies risk losing one to three million dollars in sales and competitive advantage from product launch delays every day.
- Companies whose new drugs repeatedly outperform expectations are adept at mounting timely product launches and exploiting their first-to-market advantage.
- Modern collaboration tools can significantly bolster your ability to deliver the right product at the right time.
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Today’s increasingly dynamic and competitive pharmaceutical industry has placed immense pressure on pharma companies to accelerate new drug launches. According to industry analysts, pharma companies risk losing one to three million dollars in sales and competitive advantage from product launch delays every day.
One way to mitigate this risk is to improve your pharma organization’s internal and external communications. Modern-day digital collaboration tools provide:
- Secure real-time information sharing
- Reliable remote collaboration
- Enhanced data storage and real-time access
- Easy-to-use workflows
- Seamless scalability
The pressing need for pharma to accelerate new drug market entry
The top 20 pharma companies collectively spend $60 billion on new drug development annually. Furthermore, the average cost of bringing a new drug to market is now $2.6 billion, a 140% increase over the past ten years.
Yet, despite the skyrocketing investment, the average revenue per drug has been falling since 2010. This downturn can be attributed to several factors, including fierce competition, an increasingly disrupted supply chain, rising payer influence, declining access to physicians, and a shift from primary care medications to specialty therapy areas. Declining average peak sales significantly limit the chances of maximizing returns from new launches.
Accelerating the launch of new drugs is a key strategy for counteracting this downtrend. Companies whose new drugs repeatedly outperform expectations are adept at beating their competitors to market and fully exploiting this first-to-market advantage.
To better understand why speed to market is a competitive differentiator in pharma, consider the recent example of COVID-19 vaccines.
- When COVID-19 rose to pandemic levels, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna poured billions into accelerated R&D programs that quickly established them as the top COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers.
- According to the People’s Vaccine Alliance, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna are making profits of $65,000 every minute from COVID-19 vaccine production.
- Now, with its newly launched COVID-19 pills, Pfizer is already set to dominate a new $20 billion market in 2022.
By achieving faster launches, Pfizer, BioNTech, and Moderna capitalized on the pressing need for a COVID vaccine and pre-emptively captured the market. The vaccine business alone contributed to more than 60% of Pfizer’s sales in Q3 2021 and has helped solidify the company’s position as a formidable vaccine maker for years to come.
How can robust collaboration tools help improve speed to market in pharma?
Reaping the benefits that come with faster market entry requires a dramatic shift from traditional processes and ways of working. Modern collaboration tools can significantly bolster your ability to deliver the right product at the right time.
Here are five ways advanced collaboration tools can help your pharma company improve speed to market.
1. Secure real-time information sharing
Secure information sharing is a critical requirement in pharmaceutical product research. However, companies using traditional collaboration tools often have to compromise usability and data flow in the name of enhancing security.
The best collaboration tools enable secure real-time information sharing, so every person involved in the development process has access to the latest data, insights, and information. By leveraging cloud computing, data syncing (ETL and reverse ETL), and advanced security protocols, these solutions facilitate the real-time exchange of large data volumes across teams and geographies, accelerating decision-making and improving the chances of a timely launch.
2. Reliable remote collaboration
Since pharma teams are often dispersed across the country or even around the world, reliable distributed collaboration can be challenging to achieve.
Fortunately, top-range communication platforms offer a myriad of interaction options, including phone calls, messages, real-time conferencing, and virtual meetings, that keep your teams in sync regardless of their geographic location. That way, you can stay on track to launching on time, even when your team members are on opposite sides of the world.
3. Enhanced data storage and real-time access
Speed to market often depends on your ability to present timely information to the teams that need it, using the most convenient channels available. For instance, a single drug can have multiple routes of administration that necessitate different formulations and testing stages. In some cases, your testing stage might delay because of trouble accessing critical information from a third party.
With collaboration tools offering robust data storage options and real-time access controls, you can give your team easy, secure, and flexible access to relevant data, regardless of their location.
4. Easy-to-use workflows
Pharma companies often utilize different collaboration tools for specific purposes, such as CRM, legal review, and payroll management. Unfortunately, these tools are often so inflexible that they cannot integrate with other systems. As a result, teams waste significant time and effort working around system limitations.
Leading cloud collaboration tools offer simple drag-and-drop workflows that let you easily create custom paths for different processes within one platform. That way, you can integrate collaboration into your entire content workflow process without having to waste valuable resources trying to make existing software play nice with each other.
5. Seamless scalability
Creating a fast-moving organization requires tools that quickly scale up and down as your operations adapt to market dynamics. For example, the ability to expand your resources rapidly can be useful when you need to bring in additional team members to avoid costly delays.
Similarly, if your company uses different tools for specific projects or tasks, a platform that can easily open and close communication channels and accounts without affecting other processes allows you to adapt flexibly to market dynamics and reduce overhead expenses.
The best collaboration tools offer easy, responsive, automated scalability, enabling you to maintain complete control over your organization’s growth while minimizing the time and money wasted on cumbersome manual processes.
Achieve faster market entry with RingCentral’s pharma collaboration tools
Speed to market is a primary differentiator in the pharmaceutical landscape. Accelerating product development and launch can enable your organization to quickly gain market share and brand loyalty and establish long-term dominance.
RingCentral offers best-in-class, cloud-based collaboration tools that give pharmaceutical companies the seamless and secure communications they need to launch new products on time and zoom past the competition.
By aggregating communication channels like messaging, phone, online chat, video calls, virtual conferencing, and meetings onto one platform, RingCentral pharma-focused collaboration solutions can streamline interactions within your team and with external stakeholders.
Request a demo today and experience how RingCentral’s fluid, borderless collaboration tools can help you accelerate entry-to-market and maximize both returns and your impact on society.
Originally published Mar 01, 2022, updated Feb 20, 2023
