MSD Events Compliance
Top 5 Pharmaceutical Company
The Challenge
Event management in the pharmaceutical industry requires a high degree of governance in order to meet compliance requirements in all countries around the world. One of the difficulties faced by pharma representatives in the field revolves around the event approval processes, and the lack of guidance regarding the data that needs to be collected for the submission to be deemed compliant. Other challenges faced are around the approval and finance stages, during the approval stage, the complexity for each submission required can vary from each event. Many representatives fail to collect and complete the full set of data required. Budget allocation is another challenge i.e. is there enough funds in the representative’s territory event budget, to cover the request in the submission.
The Solution
The objective was to automate the event management planning system in order to deliver a guided process for the representative to follow. The process would collect the specific data and lead the representative through the event creation, data collection, submission and approval for the event.
Veeva was chosen as the platform for this solution, Veeva is positioned in a way that it is customer facing and used by most if not all sales representatives. Veeva can be easily accessed by back office staff and this fits in well with the required approval process. This flexibility made Veeva the right platform from which we could develop a custom solution. The solution can capture the requirements for each event, gather all the prerequisite data, guide the representative through the requirements and then give an answer on whether the submission was within regulations. The tool is designed to capture all the right information prior to the submission and guide the representative through the data and budget requirements.
Although Veeva has a very competent events module, the customer required automation in the submission process, and wanted to improve accuracy by removing the guess work from the representative’s submission. The innovation in this solution comes from a very powerful system in the back end, we call this, the rules engine. The rules engine is a powerful add-on to the Veeva ecosystem, that allows us to read data from fields in Veeva and apply rules that will validate a desired result. For example, we could have a field in Veeva that contains the total approved budget for that territory, for the year. This total budget amount will allow the rules engine to keep track of the remaining balance and deduct the amount from the balance each time a new submission is approved. The rules engine can be utilised to give real-time feedback to the representative prior to submitting an event for approval.
Based on our consultation with the customer, we understood that the events policy was standard across the globe (minus regional variations) and therefore the rules we’re almost identical for everyone. This allows us to create a rule set that can be used across the board to approve events for the organisation. Veeva allows us to make regional modifications to the solution, e.g. Currency, language, and specific regulatory requirement for each event. We have created one solution which the Veeva platform allow for the customization for each geography.
