During the Medical content track at Veeva Commercial Summit, companies of all sizes came together to discuss one of their greatest common challenges: creating a “single source of the truth” for medical content.

With thought leaders increasingly interacting—and requesting information—through multiple channels, attendees agreed that addressing these requests quickly and consistently is an urgent need. To deliver KOLs timely, relevant content, via preferred channels, companies are looking for a means to centralize medical information while distributing and tracking it across channels.

Some key takeaways from the sessions included:

When we gather again at next year’s Summit, I expect more of the same – great discussions, the forging of new connections, and continued insights into how we can empower KOLs with the medical content they need.

Delivering a great application is one thing, but maintaining greatness through release after release is another. After leading a large-scale CRM release management process, I have learned that every successful project shares a few common attributes. When approaching the release management phase of the project, give some thought to the following:

A process that delivers a quality release on a regular basis instills confidence in all users. With cloud-based applications like Veeva CRM, users expect frequent application updates. Keeping a fast pace can be a bit of a balancing act between speed and quality. With every release there is a certain amount of overhead, including documentation, approvals, and testing—so when choosing a regular release interval, be sure to factor this in when defining your process. Choosing an interval spaced too far apart means users become frustrated with the length of time needed for an issue fix or enhancement.

Is there a difference between application enhancements, application issues, and product enhancement requests? Yes, there is—and the release process must accommodate for all.

To most end users, the difference between these is blurred. But for the release team, distinguishing among them is crucial, because each needs to be handled separately. Ideally, these are entered into a single system where all stakeholders have visibility. Upon entry into the system, these needs would be triaged into their appropriate category:

Application enhancements are requested to include new functionality in the application through configuration and/or custom coding. Often, the group making these requests is not aware of the impact the change could have upon other teams A simple process must be in place to manage these so that impacts can be discussed with all affected users. In addition, the cost/benefit of the request should be evaluated and ranked according to priority. This will ultimately assist in deciding whether to proceed with the request.

Application issues are behaviors in the customer specific application that deviate from the requirement description. If no requirement exists, then how do you know it’s an issue? When a requirement does not exist it is considered an application enhancement for new capabilities.

Product enhancements are requested changes that are accomplished through a change to the Veeva product itself. Like application enhancements, product enhancement requests should be discussed with all user groups that would be affected by the change. Once consensus is achieved within the business, enhancements should be ranked according to priority and presented to the Veeva product team for possible inclusion in a future Veeva release. The business should review and reprioritize these requests regularly, at least once every 4 months, to keep pace with Veeva’s release schedule.

Again, everyone on the release team should have an understanding of product and application releases. The product release refers to the Veeva product itself, while application releases involve customer-specific configuration changes. A new Veeva CRM product version is typically released once every four months. Consider having your internal application releases align with Veeva’s product releases. Why, you ask? Simple: it reduces confusion to users.

The need for speed in release management should never be at the cost of a quality deliverable. Speed is nothing without quality. Balancing these two provides a great experience and a user base that is confident and happy with the application.

Attention, sales operations managers, business analysts and data stewards: now you can see it – your master data, that is – with your very eyes.

Master data provides a consistent view of an entity – like a customer or a product – across all of a company’s systems. But before they can use it in important business projects, commercial teams need to see what’s in their master data, identify missing elements, and correct errors. Historically, they’ve had to ask their IT colleagues to run reports, a cumbersome and lengthy process. The end result? Dirty data can make its way into activities like product launches, causing poor results for the business.

Business users have long awaited the opportunity to quickly access and analyze their master data. Armed with a deeper understanding, they can identify and remedy master data problems, so that downstream business projects run effectively. The ideal master data reporting solution is:

Today, we announced Veeva Network reporting, the first life sciences solution to empower business users with built-in master data reporting. To see Veeva Network reporting in action, have a look at the online demo posted here . Attendees at the 2015 PDMA Sharing Conference can also visit Veeva at booth #111/113 for an in-depth tour. We hope to see you there!

I know many of you will be keen to hear about our exciting integration with Veeva and I wanted to give you my personal perspective straight away on the Zinc blog.

As many of you know, we founded Zinc in 2001 to help clients tackle the inefficiencies and challenges of legacy approval systems. I’m proud to say that over the years, we’ve been incredibly successful, and we now serve over 120 clients in 170 countries worldwide and have had the privilege to hire what I consider to be the best team in the industry to support our clients.

Zinc has indeed helped our clients to transform productivity and compliance across the digital supply chain but to deliver on our founding vision of transforming compliance and productivity I have lately concluded that we need to move faster.

So, with our desire to implement our vision with the greatest-possible speed, I and the management team have made a strategic decision to scale our capabilities more quickly, and we’re going to do that by joining forces with Veeva Systems and leveraging complete integration with their end-to-end multi-channel cloud content management and multichannel customer engagement platform.

Veeva and Zinc’s corporate strategies and customer-focused cultures are highly complementary.

Zinc has invested in deep sector knowledge and we pride ourselves on knowing the commercial compliance space better that anyone. Many of our staff have first-hand knowledge of working in compliance within the pharmaceutical industry and we have a gold-standard account management and customer support infrastructure which ensures that our clients actually take delivery of the productivity that they signed up for.

Veeva has deep cloud software and platform DNA and, as I’ve already mentioned, they’ve had huge success providing a wide set of platform offerings to many of the same clients Zinc serves today. Together, I believe we can build better products than either company would be able to separately, bringing enormous benefits to our combined client base.

Our plan is to combine Zinc’s deep domain knowledge and Veeva’s deep life sciences applications and cloud expertise. This means that whilst we will fully support current Zinc MAPS releases through at least 2020, Vault PromoMats will be the product we develop and sell to new customers going forward.

I firmly believe that this is a win-win outcome for Veeva and Zinc customers around the world and I look forward to working with all of you to accelerate delivery of our unchanged vision to transform compliance and productivity in the digital supply chain.

Healthcare is undergoing tremendous shifts, causing medical affairs to be regarded as the voice of pharma—the connection between the industry and the larger world of key stakeholders. The traditional life sciences engagement model, governed by a single gatekeeper—the prescribing physician—is being replaced by a village of interconnected parties. This diverse ecosystem includes payers, access teams, patients, and more, all of whom maintain important roles in ensuring that products are accepted and prescribed. Uniquely positioned in life sciences, medical affairs brings the deep expertise needed to deliver each stakeholder the specific, detailed scientific information required to improve patient outcomes.

And while pharma takes its seat at this increasingly democratic roundtable, it’s relying heavily on medical affairs to bolster credibility—in a more coordinated, customer-centric way. Medical is challenged with the task of delivering data across all channels, based on stakeholders’ interests, and product lifecycle stage. And as the medical function expands—taking on areas that were traditionally commercial, such as physician identification and managing requests for medical information—companies are taking a critical look at the foundation in place internally for delivering on industry imperatives.

Here are a few best practices for getting on the path to the new medical paradigm:

To learn more about how medical affairs supports the evolution of healthcare, read about the evolving role of MSLs, or watch a short video on how medical can drive in-depth scientific exchange.

“Land mine” is a term we use for something buried in your company that will blow up if it is uncovered. In court, even an innocuous phrase in a private email from one of your employees, such as, “this will negatively impact the bottom line,” could be a land mine. In a products liability action, a plaintiff’s lawyer could use this statement to undermine the credibility of your organization.

When was the last time you cringed after reading a document written by someone in your organization as you imagined how a prosecutor or plaintiff’s lawyer could use it to imply sinister behavior? Maybe it was just last week or last month. It’s not that your employees don’t care – it’s just that they don’t know.

Every day thousands of documents are saved which because of technology, can be retrieved indefinitely. As we say, documents are like diamonds – they are very precious and they last forever. Many companies have adopted electronic document management systems to get control of the documents and capture communication on the content instead of using email. However, to survive in our litigious society, organizations need to have the right communications culture. Everyone needs to understand what they should, or should not, write in their documents, and how to leverage technology to help enforce company policies and gain better visibility into risk.

Industry leaders like Pfizer, Bayer, Chevron and Eli Lilly have learned the hard way when they were involved in costly lawsuits. The media reported that Wyeth’s reserve for Fen-Phen litigation is $21 billion and Merck’s exposure to Vioxx lawsuits may total as much as $50 billion. During discovery, these companies were forced to produce documents that contained embarrassing, inflammatory statements that contributed to their expensive settlements. In a particularly noteworthy case, Microsoft was subject to the same fate after it came to light from meeting minutes that Bill Gates said, “How much do we have to pay you to screw Netscape?”
All of your employees must know how to write documents that are complete and accurate and do not create land mines, and how to better manage those critical assets.

Nancy Singer, ex-attorney for DOJ, currently trains FDA inspectors on “Avoiding Document Land Mines.” Come join our interactive session at the 2015 R&D Summit and learn how to write records for regulatory compliance, identify content that puts organizations at risk, and manage content leveraging Vault QualityDocs to support company policies.

Life sciences companies say that when it comes to managing promotional content, they are missing key capabilities that would improve compliance efforts. This is one of the key takeaways from a global survey of more than 200 regulatory, marketing, and medical professionals, commissioned by Veeva Systems and conducted by Fierce Markets. The purpose of the survey was to determine which types of promotional content management systems are currently in use and how pleased life sciences companies are with the primary systems they are using.

Preliminary findings from the survey reveal that the majority of companies rely on multiple systems to manage promotional content, using an average of four systems total. Surprisingly, the most popular primary promotional management system is still paper and/or email. Not only that, but even among those companies using more sophisticated primary systems, a large number still use paper and email to manage at least some promotional content management tasks.

Companies, overall, are dissatisfied with this patchwork approach to promotional content management, with multiple breakpoints and information handoffs. One reason for the dissatisfaction is potentially costly compliance gaps.

While almost half of those surveyed automate part of the promotional content management process – review and approval – companies cited a number of other functions, which, if automated, would aid compliance. For instance, when it comes to withdrawing a promotional claim from the public domain, most companies either have to manually verify a claim has been removed from all documents, or they have no way to verify it at all. A majority of survey respondents said automated claim withdrawal would improve compliance.

The survey also revealed that adding specific automated capabilities throughout the promotional content asset lifecycle may help companies reduce use of supplementary systems and finally move to a fully digital process. That’s because one group of survey respondents – those using industry-specific end-to-end promotional content management systems – relied significantly less on secondary systems to complete all functions across the digital supply chain. This group also reported significantly higher satisfaction (80%-100%) with their primary promotional content management system.

Moving to fully-digital promotional content management systems takes on added urgency going forward, as companies prepare for mandatory digital submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017. Where is your company along the journey towards an optimally-compliant, fully-digital, end-to-end approach to promotional content management? Get the early survey results and find out how your organization compares.

Every life sciences company needs accurate customer information for effective sales and marketing engagements, and master data management (‘MDM’) provides that trusted, single view. But adoption styles can vary widely between mega-brands, merged entities, and newly-commercialized organizations. In this podcast series, Veeva’s Brain Uber shares his perspective on why MDM is essential for life sciences, and how to make the best choices to ensure broad stakeholder acceptance and effective MDM implementation.

Life sciences companies say that when it comes to managing promotional content, they are missing key capabilities that would improve compliance efforts. This is one of the key takeaways from a global survey of more than 200 regulatory, marketing, and medical professionals, commissioned by Veeva Systems and conducted by Fierce Markets. The purpose of the survey was to determine which types of promotional content management systems are currently in use and how pleased life sciences companies are with the primary systems they are using.

Preliminary findings from the survey reveal that the majority of companies rely on multiple systems to manage promotional content, using an average of four systems total. Surprisingly, the most popular primary promotional management system is still paper and/or email. Not only that, but even among those companies using more sophisticated primary systems, a large number still use paper and email to manage at least some promotional content management tasks.

Companies, overall, are dissatisfied with this patchwork approach to promotional content management, with multiple breakpoints and information handoffs. One reason for the dissatisfaction is potentially costly compliance gaps.

While almost half of those surveyed automate part of the promotional content management process – review and approval – companies cited a number of other functions, which, if automated, would aid compliance. For instance, when it comes to withdrawing a promotional claim from the public domain, most companies either have to manually verify a claim has been removed from all documents, or they have no way to verify it at all. A majority of survey respondents said automated claim withdrawal would improve compliance.

The survey also revealed that adding specific automated capabilities throughout the promotional content asset lifecycle may help companies reduce use of supplementary systems and finally move to a fully digital process. That’s because one group of survey respondents – those using industry-specific end-to-end promotional content management systems – relied significantly less on secondary systems to complete all functions across the digital supply chain. This group also reported significantly higher satisfaction (80%-100%) with their primary promotional content management system.

Moving to fully-digital promotional content management systems takes on added urgency going forward, as companies prepare for mandatory digital submissions to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2017. Where is your company along the journey towards an optimally-compliant, fully-digital, end-to-end approach to promotional content management? Get the early survey results and find out how your organization compares.

Over 450 people attended the 2015 Veeva R&D Summit in early November to share how cloud has quickly transformed operations by supporting agile and distributed business models. With increased outsourcing of key development and manufacturing functions, one of the hot topics was how to manage data and content for a product lifecycle when most of the information is externally generated. Top life sciences companies outlined how they are incorporating Vault QualityDocs into operational processes to support data quality, and ensure content traceability with vendors such as contract test labs and manufacturers — improving collaboration, reducing cycle times, and supporting faster decision-making.

Impax Labs discussed their global deployment of Vault QualityDocs to more than a 1,000 users, and how the application’s built-in best practices accelerated implementation. The solution supports local processes and multiple languages, while allowing Impax to gain greater control, operational efficiency, and visibility into quality processes. Other highlights include an interactive session led by Nancy Singer, who currently trains FDA investigators, and Bob Kenney on how to write records for regulatory compliance and use Vault QualityDocs to support company policies.

Many of the presentations also touched on validation. Even though the Veeva Vault applications are designed for a highly regulated industry with stringent validation requirements, it was great to hear first-hand from companies that have been through multiple releases. Customers say the validation process is much easier due to Veeva’s comprehensive validation package with each release that includes IQ and OQ tests. Veeva’s validation documentation and methodology has significantly reduced the burden for companies. You can access select presentations from the Summit here, and I look forward to another great event next year. Block October 17-19, 2016 on your calendar today.

Meet Our Data Science Partners: The Power Behind Veeva CRM Suggestions
Healthcare data comes in all different shapes and sizes. To start, you have demographic data, interaction data, market data, and clinical data. Then you’ve got “soft” data points, like whether healthcare professionals (HCPs) prefer to be contacted by email or phone. Do they tweet? Are they active in social networks? Professional associations? Who influences them and who do they influence? All of this data is at your disposal, but the quantity is dizzying to imagine and nearly impossible to comprehend.

But customer data can be used very effectively to direct field teams to their next best action. Veeva CRM Suggestions is a rep dashboard, powered by data science, which recommends best actions and channels for each customer. Armed with the right combination of data science and a system for alerting them when the timing is right, your commercial teams will be ready to engage their customers with the information they need most.

Sounds great, but where does the data science power come from? If you have already developed a predictive analytics algorithm for crunching your customer data, you can feed your proprietary recommendations directly into Veeva CRM. But most companies turn to partner solutions as a jumping-off point. That’s why we’ve integrated our trusted data science partners’ technology into Veeva CRM. With Suggestions, you’re free chose your approach.

We’re pleased to introduce the Veeva data science partners, to help guide your selection:

Aktana has been providing suggestions to pharmaceutical sales reps for the past five years, and has successfully implemented with seven of the top 15 pharmaceutical companies and a number of mid-sized companies. Having extensive experience with data-driven suggestions, Aktana takes into equal consideration the math in their analytics engine and the workflow and behavior psychology of the pharma sales rep. Aktana begins the process by using the pharmaceutical customers’ analytic knowledge and engagement strategy as a starting point before introducing machine learning algorithms.

Axtria is a big data analytics company that combines industry knowledge, analytics, and technology to help clients make better data-driven decisions. Their Target Triggers offering provides reps with a weekly list of HCP targets with notable opportunities for the company’s brands. Sales reps receive information on HCP message preferences through Message Triggers. And Strategic Triggers arm reps with a list of HCP targets that are ready for specific personal promotions.

Zephyr Health is an insights-as-a-service company harnessing the power of big data for precise product lifecycle performance. Zephyr Illuminate delivers visual insights from thousands of data sources. The offering adds medical and market context to Veeva CRM Suggestions by surfacing insights for a specific disease area and region. Zephyr Recommendations give field teams “next best” actions with predictive, data-driven and actionable business insights extracted from the Illuminate platform.

ZS Associates leverages more than 30 years of sales & marketing commercial strategy and data science expertise to develop Suggestion Engine^TM. Suggestion Engine is a fully-hosted service that includes a predefined suggestions library, prioritized suggestion list, and pre-built reports. The self-learning algorithm delivers improved recommended actions based on field adoption of suggestions, rep feedback and multichannel data updates.

Ready to help your reps deliver more relevant, timely information to customers? Click here to learn how with Veeva CRM Suggestions.

Executing on new digital marketing strategies can be a daunting task. Do you have the right environment? The right tools? Where do you start? While there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach, it does help to look at your company from a fresh perspective.

As director of Vault PromoMats strategy, I’ve helped many Veeva customers evaluate their requirements for multichannel marketing execution. Throughout this journey, I’ve identified six major elements for a successful approach. By using these points to navigate your multichannel program, you’ll be well positioned to overcome common obstacles and deliver impactful campaigns across all customer touch points.

1. Executive Sponsorship
When a project or capability can potentially have a tremendous impact on your organization, the idea of having your organization’s executive team on board is important. Whether it be your CEO or CMO, gaining executive sponsorship is a key starting point and will drive buy in and alignment across an organization. Success relies on clear mandates and a commitment from the management level, directing the key stakeholders in a cross functional team.

2. Program Vision
Program vision is a critical step in which you develop your vision and a charter for your effort. Determine what you are trying to achieve by asking, “Why are we doing this?” Once you’ve determined your intentions, map out attainable goals which will be unique to every organization. After laying the foundation, determine how exactly all of the moving pieces in your multichannel vision will function and operate. This will make it clear to the entire team, whether it be someone in marketing or an important stakeholder, what everyone’s role is and how to work together.

In addition to a program vision, there should be a vision related to how this program is supported by your operational functions. Include operational colleagues early so they understand the program vision and can ensure the people, processes, and technology are in place to support your vision and enable innovation. Be clear of the operational imperatives including speed to market and the ability to support multichannel execution. Stay realistic about the capabilities and capacity you have to move this through the digital supply chain to meet the needs of the market.

3. Internal Alignment
Communicate your plans early and often so that everyone understands their role. Think of the flow of information through your organization and who needs to touch the campaign and the content. Your team will be made up from a lot of different people in various areas. Too often we operate in silos without taking a step backwards to really understand who else needs to hear and understand our plans. It’s important to overcome the silos and bring the strengths of cross discipline contributors and teams under a common goal for the organization and the customer in order for multichannel marketing to function well.

4. Experienced Partners
A massive multichannel program requires partners who understand the vision while also having the necessary skills to bring it through to the end. Taking on a more robust multichannel initiative requires an expansion of your partnerships. As we rely on agencies to be creative and innovative, we can also depend on our agency partners to drive more robust programs that require collaboration with multiple stakeholders. Sometimes the observations or assistance from an outside consultant can be exactly what you need. These partners can help build content and get you and your team aligned with collaboration, planning, timing, workload, proper use of your resources, and communications. It’s paramount to select a partner who can execute at multiple levels.

5. Actionable Planning
Put time into your brand planning and execution to ensure it moves forward. If you don’t have a solid plan, your stakeholders will not have insight into how your content is progressing which can backslide your efforts. The plan should not only include what you plan to do, but how you plan to get it done. Since you are coordinating across many different mediums in multichannel marketing, failing with one component can bring down the entire effort. Your plan should also allow for some shifts in priorities for unforeseen changes that can develop during the program. There is an 80/20 rule of multichannel marketing planning where 80% of your plans are locked and 20% of your plans can and will be dynamic.

6. Enduring Commitment
Commit to your plan. There are organizations out there that encounter a hurdle and aren’t able to adapt, causing their efforts to be unsuccessful. It’s essential to maintain an enduring commitment that you think of as a long term vision and develop in a way that’s systematic. Be sure your team is up to speed on the vision documentation, the roadmap, and that each individual recognizes their responsibility and how they are sharing failure and success across the organization.

In the end it’s all about visibility, communication, and ultimately celebrating your success. To be successful, you need to talk to stakeholders, customers, and your team. Be sure everyone is exchanging information and ideas in a clear and transparent manner and be sure to ask the right questions. For more insight into how to successfully get your innovative content to market, listen to our previously recorded webinar here.

I recently had the pleasure of working on a project with Carol Jacobson, principal consultant, transformation consulting practice at Veeva, and wanted to learn more about this team with arguably the best title ever.

Carol and Transformation Consulting Practice Director, Shannon Norton, graciously agreed to indulge my curiosity (and, I hope, yours) in a recent interview.

Describe the role of the transformation consultant (TC), and how it is different than the other roles in the commercial professional services organization.

Shannon Norton (SN): Let’s first take a step back in history prior to the introduction of the Transformation Consulting practice two years ago. Veeva’s commercial services function was targeted to the end-to-end customer lifecycle. The services team’s goals were to successfully implement Veeva technology, keep the customers up to date with new releases, and help them take advantage of all available functionality. But as both our customer base and the portfolio of integrated solutions grew, it became clear that we needed to carve out a role focused specifically on business process transformation.

What specific customer needs does your consulting practice address?

SN: Let’s take Veeva CRM Approved Email. It is a straightforward technology. It’s easy to understand its commercial value. But customers needed help to figure out how to use this new channel in concert with their other engagement channels. So we work with marketing operations, brand teams, agencies, sales operations and IT, to tie it back to business strategy and help them get the greatest value out of their investment.

Carol Jacobson (CJ): I’ll give you another example. When Veeva CLM was launched, five years ago, we worked with our customers on their business processes related to content creation. We held workshops on processes needed to standardize content creation. But each customer has a different way of doing business, with different policies, so there isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all approach to optimizing their investment. We work within the boundaries of each customer’s corporate policies, to help them get to the best business process for them. In the digital marketing space, often there are multiple stakeholders, including IT, agencies, MLR, and marketing operations. We work with them all.

SN: We can come in at any point of a project: at the start, in the middle, or sometimes at the end. Our sweet spot is working with our customers on their business processes when they have just launched new functionality. To that end, we work closely with the Veeva product team as they are developing products. The product team is interested in what people are seeing in the field as they develop the product. When working on an implementation project with external consultants, we address Veeva-specific challenges. We also document and standardize processes across the brand.

Can you give an example of a typical ‘Day in The Life of a TC?’

SN: Everyone on the team is working with between two and seven customers, so we are all good at managing our time. It helps us to stay fresh with best practices because we support multiple customers at once. All our customers want to know about best practices. By having exposure to more than one customer at a time we take anonymized learnings from one customer to another.

CJ: I have been working with one customer since early on in the Veeva Vault PromoMats –Veeva CLM integration. From my early involvement there, I have knowledge that can help other customers with their processes. Processes and configuration will be different from customer to customer. With exposure to more than one customer at a time, we understand the breadth of possibilities.

What is the advantage of using a Veeva TC?

SN: We are a group of smart folks that understand the state of the industry, and how to use Veeva technology to move the business forward. We work directly with customers, as well as third party firms, and are often complimentary to their efforts. Our deep experience in how the product works and knowledge is where we help our customers greatly.

How long does a company generally retain a transformation consultant?

CJ: It varies. I have been consulting with one of my clients for two years, on a part-time basis. Some projects are between three and six months. Our enterprise implementations are significant projects and can last for a year or more. Other projects are just four to six weeks long. Most of the processes are defined at the start of the project, and the customer wants to work strategically and take advantage of what Veeva has to offer. A customer might want to do something new with a particular functionality. Or, we help them to understand what use cases are out there to increase the utility of the product.

What do you typically look for when hiring a TC?

SN: I look for folks that have pharma experience, management consulting experience, and technology aptitude. Honestly, a good transformation consultant is hard to find. They need a strong understanding of the technology and the associated processes. But they also have to be a good listener and a compelling presenter. A successful consultant has to be able to go into a new business environment and quickly grasp the landscape so they can immediately start bringing value.

CJ: You have to be a multi-tasking person. The reason customers consider us as trusted advisors is that we get interested in new things, and become passionate about them. A transformation consultant has to be flexible and committed and have the willingness to dive deeply into new projects.

Shannon and Carol each have had fascinating careers before taking on their current roles. Shannon started her professional career as an insurance underwriter. She completed her MBA at New York University, and then joined Pfizer, where she worked in commercial IT and Operations for twelve years before joining Veeva. In fact, Shannon was one of Veeva’s very first recipients of our annual Customer Innovator Hero Award for her support of the Veeva project at Pfizer.

Carol has a PhD in Neuroanatomy. She was a tenured professor at Iowa State University before joining an engineering animation firm. Then she was president at iMed Studios, a division of Publicis Healthcare Communications, for eleven years before joining Veeva as a Certified Veeva Administrator in CRM and Vault.

Want to learn how Veeva’s Transformation Consulting Practice can help your business? For more information, contact Shannon Norton at Shannon.norton@veeva.com

Search “master data management” (MDM) online and you will get more than 60 million hits. Most hits are articles or whitepapers, mainly from software vendors. You will notice that many focus on confusion and negativity with titles such as 10 Misconceptions about MDM, Explaining the Complexity of MDM to Business Executives, Demystifying MDM, and my favorite, Why MDM Projects Fail.

Master data management is like the ugly duckling.

For years, MDM has been a technology struggling for recognition and acceptance. Software vendors and system integrators bear some of the blame because they have treated MDM as a technology project rather than a business transformation imperative. At the end of the day, the value of MDM has not been well communicated.

In the life sciences industry, transparency reporting and IDMP (Identification of Medicinal Products) regulations have clearly set up the need for the long-coveted “single version of truth” for customer and product data. The fact is no business sponsor will sign off on a MDM project for its own sake. In order to turn our ugly duckling into a white swan, there must be clear business benefits from MDM projects.

So first let’s go back to basics.

What is Master Data Management?
Master Data Management is a mindset based on the fact that data is a corporate asset and mission critical to all business functions. It enables the business to work efficiently with good, unique, controlled and shared data. MDM is enabled by technology but is more than technology. It encompasses resources dedicated to managing master data and enforcing business rules, as well processes for accessing, controlling, remediating, and distributing the data.

The challenge is that data is everywhere – often fragmented, duplicated and inconsistently formatted. Just as procedures and policies exist for other corporate functions such as finance and human resources, a governance standard must be set for data. MDM provides the foundation for such governance.

Why Do Life Sciences Companies Need Master Data Management?

Organizations use on average 36 different data-gathering systems and vendors for marketing efforts, according to Forbes Insights. This finding explains why 83% of companies struggle to link customer information across channels, as indicated by Experian.

Data silos built over many years and/or gained through acquisitions and mergers are roadblocks to any customer centricity strategy or regulatory compliance. How can life sciences organizations comply with transparency requirements without having one single view of healthcare professionals? How can they identify and maintain affiliations between healthcare organizations and physicians? How can they centrally manage and provision customer preferences and privacy?

How Can Life Sciences Benefit from Master Data Management?

Addressing the right healthcare professional, at the right time, through the right consented channel, and for the right indication requires reliable, accessible customer data. By efficiently managing master data, life sciences companies can use their sales and marketing budget more effectively by having more targeted discussions and campaigns.

To bring the value of master data management to life in real world examples, we will present a series of use cases. We will show you how MDM can make field sales representatives happy and productive.

Stay tuned for the first part of the series.

Medical affairs is in the center of two major—and seemingly contradictory—trends: a significant increase in size, and a corresponding challenge with demonstrating strategic impact. According to a global 2015 survey of medical organizations of all sizes—from top 10 pharmas to small companies—the number of MSLs across the board is expected to grow by 36% in the next year, respondents report. However, 63% of surveyed MSL teams struggle to prove value to upper management.

Medical affairs’ critical importance in healthcare is inarguable. Medical teams are scientific experts, well-positioned to engage with KOLs and new stakeholders like payers on the complex science behind more targeted indications. Medical affairs, however, faces these growing pressures on top of a host of new responsibilities. Stakeholder engagement, medical information and communications, and contributing strategically to organizational goals are just a few of medical’s new responsibilities, with life sciences’ evolving business model.

With a goal of bringing medical affairs professionals together to network, share, and learn, we are proud to host a focused Medical Summit. Held June 8-10 in Philadelphia, the medical affairs track will cover the evolution of the stakeholder, demonstrating value beyond the traditional KPI, and improving the medical-commercial partnership. Join industry experts and leaders from the world’s top pharmas, to learn how medical teams can help build lasting relationships and create value as the industry evolves. At this year’s Veeva Summit, medical affairs professionals will hear best practices and real world case studies focused on:

Register today for one of the industry’s largest events for life sciences. To learn more about the evolution of medical affairs, visit veeva.com/medical-solutions/.

CEO Peter Gassner: digital disruption is driving transformation in life sciences

The digital opportunity in life sciences was on full display last week as more than 1,200 professionals converged on Philadelphia at one of the largest events dedicated to commercial and medical solutions. The 2016 Veeva Commercial Summit, now in its eighth year, is the event for the industry to learn, connect, and share valuable insights and best practices on the big trends impacting life sciences. The energy and excitement was evident at this year’s Summit with more than 100 companies in attendance, making it the biggest event yet.

Veeva co-founders, Peter Gassner and Matt Wallach, opened with keynotes on digital disruption and the path to transformation in life sciences. The consumerization of technology is expanding digital into many areas of the enterprise. For example, there are now greater expectations of digitally-native physicians for information to be online and on-demand for fast, easy, convenient access anywhere, anytime. Industry experts, Amy Landucci of Novartis and Anne O’Riordan of Accenture, echoed that there is a “tsunami of change” and a growing role of digital solutions throughout the industry. As one global biopharmaceutical customer put it, “The word of the decade for us is digital.”

The focus for many life sciences companies is how best to use the power of digital for areas such as content management – where content reuse is key for a highly effective, efficient digital supply chain – and online engagement with healthcare professionals (HCPs). Much of the demand is being driven by the need to get the right information to the right person at the right time – through any channel or device. When you layer on regulation in life sciences, the shift to digital is challenging.

Some life sciences companies have progressed along the digital journey and are seeing impactful results. That was apparent in many sessions and conversations throughout the event as customers shared their stories. Cathy Hayes, director of commercial solutions at AstraZeneca, has been on a digital transformation journey for 12 months now. “Our goal is to remodel our commercial operations for a new market,” said Cathy. “As we shift our focus from primary care therapies to specialty products, digital strategies need to be embedded in all that we do. Within Commercial Operations, we created a Marketing Excellence team and are training all of our marketers and sales reps on how to fully leverage new technologies, such as Veeva CRM Approved Email, that are part of Veeva Commercial Cloud.”

Press Release: GSK Adds New Veeva Commercial Cloud Applications Following the Success of Veeva CRM

Customers are at different stages of their digital transformation journey, all with similar goals of greater productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness of their commercial operations. Every year Veeva recognizes the Veeva Heroes that are leading innovation and driving massive transformation in the industry. Each of these individuals have contributed significantly to Veeva’s history and product innovation and, in many respects, are paving the digital path that will benefit many companies throughout the industry.

Veeva CEO Peter Gassner honors the 2016 Veeva Heroes

The rapid pace of Veeva innovation continued this week, as we unveiled three new Commercial Cloud applications to support companies’ shift to digital. Veeva CRM Engage Meeting and Veeva CRM Engage Webinar will transform customer engagement by making it easy and compliant for reps to interact online with HCPs, while Veeva Vault PromoMats DAM will meet life sciences’ demands for advanced enterprise digital asset management capabilities, including larger file sizes, greater storage capacity, and more robust image and video file handling. All three solutions will be game changers in opening up online channels and managing rich digital content that is becoming more pervasive.

Press Release: New Veeva CRM Engage Meeting and Veeva CRM Engage Webinar Make Digital Engagement in Life Sciences Easier and More Compliant

Press Release: Veeva Introduces Vault PromoMats DAM to Deliver Advanced Digital Asset Management Capabilities in Life Sciences

Veeva is also making continued investments in other areas such as Veeva OpenData and Key Account Management (KAM). Veeva OpenData provides a better alternative for HCP, healthcare organization, affiliations, email, and compliance data, currently spanning 35 countries today, with plans for 50 countries by the end of 2017. Veeva is also committed to delivering an integrated KAM solution to address the transition from selling to a prescriber as the sole decision maker to a multiple stakeholder model.

Moving forward, Veeva will continue to help support the life sciences industry through its digital transformation. Consumer adoption of digital technology will have profound positive implications in life sciences in areas such as personalized medicine and pharma and doctor engagement, for example. Matt Wallach summed it up best during his keynote: the golden age of life sciences is coming. There is no doubt that digital solutions will play a big role, and Veeva hopes to earn its place as one of the industry’s most strategic partners in helping customers capture the digital opportunity.

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Digital media is driving rapid change for pharmaceutical marketers. Navigating this new digital landscape is tricky. Content is spread across many different channels including social media, rich media, blogs, stakeholder communities, websites, and mobile applications. While these content streams empower more targeted customer engagement, they are not without challenge. These shifts have impacted the review, approval, and distribution process for commercial content.

Modern life sciences firms are defining new processes for getting commercial content to market quickly, compliantly, and consistently across the world. Due to the increase of rich digital media, many organizations encounter a challenge in compliance and consistency in the chain of custody. This challenge drives a demand for a solution built specifically for complexities within the life sciences industry. The need for a global commercial content management system is more critical than ever.

Despite the changing environment, data confirms that many life sciences companies still use manual, paper-based or home-grown document management systems to track distribution and withdrawal of materials. For example, according to Veeva’s 2015 Commercial Content Management Survey, 89% of respondents rely on multiple systems and methods to manage content and 41% still use paper-based processes for certain functions.

Organizations still operating under traditional methodologies can learn to embrace a new infrastructure by honestly evaluating their existing digital supply chain. The concept of the digital supply chain describes how materials are managed and approved from the ideation stage, through content creation, review team process, delivery to market, and expiry and withdrawal.

In order to achieve a seamless digital supply chain, life sciences organizations can now manage their commercial content from end-to-end within a single software platform that maximizes the value of time invested in creating and distributing compliant commercial content. Software solutions that facilitate management of the end-to-end content lifecycle provide significant opportunities for improving the content creation, approval and distribution process, and increasing speed-to-market and cost savings.

To further understand the key capabilities needed for optimal end-to-end commercial content management and how to effectively evaluate your digital supply chain, read our recent white paper, “Managing Content Across the Digital Supply Chain.”

Missed part 1? Watch Why MedComms: The Medical Affairs Landscape now

Our Veeva Viewpoint column features our best and brightest minds discussing the topics about which they are most passionate.

The Global Reach of Regional Innovations
Veeva View Point with Arno Sosna, General Manager, CRM

Recently, we spoke with Arno Sosna, vice president of CRM product management at Veeva, to understand how his worldwide team of product managers synthesizes local requirements into global CRM capabilities. We found Arno’s insights compelling, and we’re delighted to share them with you.

During the process of designing and innovating within regional requirements, there are global implications to address. Can you expand on that for us?

Even when you design at the local level, it’s critical to be aware of the global ramifications. There are inherent challenges in going global with a single application, because you still need to satisfy regional regulations and create go-to-market processes that reflect local business practices. In other words, a single application must satisfy different cultures, habits, work structures and legal environments. Since these elements vary drastically across the globe, Veeva product managers must deeply understand each individual region and its customers. Then, we build a single, global product that can change shape to operate in different regions, each with their own unique requirements.

Have you seen instances in which a global company deploys an innovation in a particular region, sees it perform well, and then expands its use to other regions?

Often times, a particular region will bring a great idea to the table. In a certain sense, Veeva’s global CRM application is made up of a collection of best practices we’ve found working with our customers across the globe. For example, a customer in Japan needed a new way of scheduling appointments. From that need, the One-Click Scheduler, was born, and it has become a standard in our scheduling function.

Another example of a regional innovation that took off globally was Photo Capture in China. China was having participation problems with their representatives at events, so companies began using Photo Capture at medical events to document attendance by taking photos of the audience and attaching them into the CRM. As they became familiar with its capabilities, customers started to get creative with this feature. For example, they would use it to upload a photo of information that they didn’t have the time to type.

As General Manager, CRM, Arno Sosna defines the direction of all Veeva CRM products, ensuring that Veeva delivers best in class products for each global region, with a focus on streamlined usability, rich functionality and end-to-end customer success. Arno has extensive experience as a Product Manager and System Architect of global CRM systems, and a background in life sciences that spans Rx, OTC and Animal Health businesses. Arno’s work has led him across several continents—Europe, the Americas and Asia—so he is familiar with an array of markets and can balance a global perspective with an understanding of local requirements.