Biopharma Company Uses Planview Advisor’s Advanced Analytics Capabilities to Unlock R&D Value

The Global Biopharmaceutical Company sought a unified, crossfunctional platform to conduct valuations, perform deep analytics, and create forward-looking scenarios using precise, real-time data. The goal was to improve decision-making in their business operations. However, the R&D departments and Strategy Office needed a unified solution. They relied on scores of spreadsheets to collect and track the data and provide deep analytics required for annual portfolio reviews, financial reporting, and strategic decision-making. Managing and updating so many files was often a lengthy process that yielded inaccurate and obsolete data.

Providing them with the critical capability of collating organization-wide knowledge, the company chose the Planview® Advisor solution to help them democratize data and unlock R&D value. With Planview Advisor, these leaders in biopharma could leverage the platform’s robust analytics and reporting capabilities to perform real-time data analysis, generate accurate business intelligence, inform better portfolio management, and drive effective decision-making.

Biopharma firms with diverse product mixes often need help to effectively harness the massive amounts of data they generate. So much varied data makes streamlining the formulation of deep business insights to inform strategic decision-making difficult and timeconsuming. With a vast array of products in multiple disease categories, this company was no exception to this common challenge.

Before partnering with Planview, the company relied on various spreadsheets for data collection, valuation, and analytics across its pharmaceutical products and product categories. Managing all those files and ensuring they were updated with accurate data took a great deal of time and effort and could quickly breed errors.

Often, portfolio data needed to be more accurate, making its verification by business unit leaders challenging. Compiling data from multiple spreadsheets for portfolio evaluations was a time-consuming, manual process that often took weeks. The length of this process created restrictions on the number of portfolio evaluations that could be performed. Furthermore, financial reporting requested by executives and other stakeholders needed to arrive faster and was prone to data quality issues.

The exasperation reached a tipping point during a yearly portfolio review that manifested in insufficient data. It became clear that the company needed a better solution for collecting and sharing accurate data in real-time during portfolio reviews. Adding this intelligence layer would enable them to build scenarios and perform the in-depth analyses necessary to quickly and effectively make well-informed product prioritization decisions aligned with market conditions.

After a thorough vetting process, leadership for the Biopharma Company found that Planview Advisor was the only solution to deliver the in-depth analytics capabilities they needed. Using the cloud-based analytics platform, the company could consolidate project data from multiple sources; perform complex market and financial simulations; and run forward-looking scenarios, variance, and sensitivity analyses on a single asset, product line, or an entire portfolio.

“Our previous solution was so backward-looking,” says a leader in the BioPharma Strategy Office. “Planview Advisor was forward-looking, giving us deep insights into where we could go and needed to be, rather than just where we had been up until now.” Planview Advisor was also the only solution that tackled all the processes required for portfolio reviews and monthly financial reporting, with direct live links to the company’s R&D database. The multinational Biopharma Company achieved a 50% reduction in time to produce reporting through this added capability. The solution also enables users to send therapeutic department heads reports containing links to real-time data, speeding the vetting process before portfolio reviews and helping to ensure accuracy.

Planview Advisor has had a significantly positive impact on improving the data-quality issues that plagued the company previously. “We now have much better data quality thanks to the superior visibility, quality checks, and quality assurance available with Planview Advisor’s reporting and auditing functions,” says a leader in the BioPharma Strategy Office. The company is now equipped with the cross-functional reporting capabilities they need − from Finance, Portfolio, IT, sponsors, and senior leadership − allowing them to meet earlier more often to progress business initiatives rapidly.

By helping the organization identify gaps in its product mix through the real-time proliferation of democratized data, Planview Advisor enables the organization to respond faster with competitive innovations, gaining an edge on the market. With the ability to run realtime portfolio scenario analysis and adjust inputs on-the-fly, teams can deliver highly-visual reports to senior executives in hours rather than weeks. “Thanks to Planview Advisor, we can now leverage the collective vision of the entire organization for every single critical research and development decision,” says a leader in the BioPharma Strategy Office. “Planview Advisor has enhanced all our financial modeling and long-term planning dramatically.”