Pharmaceuticals

Financial pressure, regulatory changes and burgeoning numbers of decision-makers within the healthcare sector are among the factors calling into question the pharmaceutical industry's present operating model.

These pressures are compounded by low R&D output, costly product withdrawals and lower revenue per product.

Developing high performance operating models in a challenging environment

For Rx suppliers, discovering and marketing promising innovations is getting more difficult, expensive and risky – and hard for individual ethical pharmaceutical suppliers or biotech firms to finance on their own. Establishing a well-organized and competitive network is becoming increasingly crucial for success. We provide a fresh perspective on aligning your operations along the entire value chain: reviewing your corporate management structure, improving your R&D performance, launching blockbuster products efficiently, increasing your marketing and sales effectiveness, implementing new supply chain capabilities and developing best-in-class support functions.

The pharmaceuticals market is driven by pressure on margins, the onslaught of generics and ubiquitous cost containment efforts. To hold their own, generic suppliers must achieve cost leadership – all the more so as governments and health insurers increasingly favor cheap products to reduce overall spending. Aspiring leaders develop and implement innovative market strategies, strive for continuous globalization, manage commercial excellence and excel at managing the supply chain and optimizing production sites. And we help them do so.

Patients are increasingly becoming customers, and their influence is growing. OTC products are therefore gaining substantial market share. We support OTC suppliers with appropriate approaches, such as customer relationship management, multilateral sales channels management or exploiting the opportunities of direct mail and e-commerce, to successfully address the challenges involved.

Roland Berger offers Rx, generics and OTC suppliers customized approaches that take their different business models into account, covering areas such as:

• Commercial excellence
• R&D excellence
• Operations excellence
• Management and organizational excellence
• Business development and partnering excellence

Post-merger integration of two leading pharmaceutical companies

Roland Berger Strategy Consultants assisted the integration of two leading European pharmaceutical companies in 2004. After we defined the joint new operating model, we focused on the commercial strategy. This included shaping the portfolio of the merged entity, allocating the necessary marketing and sales resources and harmonizing commercial policies. Another significant part of our support included reviewing the core processes, designing the new target organization and defining the structure and size of enabling functions such as finance, HR and IT. Finally, we helped tackle general integration challenges such as the cultural/legal framework, site selection, cost synergy and supply chain issues. A central integration office was in charge of overall project coordination, while RBpoint, our project monitoring tool, helped us track all activities and achieve all project goals in an ambitious timeframe.

Commercial excellence to boost sales performance

A global pharmaceutical customer found out that actively managing its commercial capabilities was a prerequisite for future growth. In the past, commercial operations had been managed on a country by country basis, commercial practices were hardly ever shared and external benchmarking happened rarely. To extract the maximum revenues from the current and future product portfolio, our client intended to initiate a process that would drive innovation and effectiveness. Based on Roland Berger's commercial excellence framework, we worked with our client to develop a new commercial operating model. We helped the client describe the key standards and processes for all key levers of commercial excellence (e.g. targeting, call quality, organization, marketing and sales interactions, metrics, people and performance, etc.). Using our proven assessment approach, we worked with countries across the globe to understand their individual strengths and weaknesses and developed action plans to improve performance. Furthermore, we defined and implemented a portfolio of global initiatives supporting our client on its way toward commercial excellence. Roland Berger provided content expertise, project management competency and change management capabilities to help our client reach the next level of commercial excellence in an increasingly challenging environment.