The Benefits of Digital Transformation for Life Sciences
The ever-growing demands on life sciences organizations involve being able to quickly respond to changing regulatory requirements, while supporting new clinical practices and data standards to remain competitive. From the discovery phase all the way into manufacturing and distribution, it’s vital for this industry to manage risks and drive innovation to deliver superior services and products.
To address these challenges, life sciences organizations can greatly benefit from digital transformation. This application of digital technologies reduces human error, improves communication, digitizes manual processes and shifts human-run processes to software. Digital transformation is not just about automating business processes, but is a discipline that uses a combination of analysis, modeling, measurement, execution, monitoring, management and automation to optimize the flow of business activity. The focus is on combining staff, IT and document workflow to improve corporate performance.
Most life sciences organizations struggle with the management of their clinical data, trial management processes and finding ways to efficiently consolidate data across multiple sites. Other issues include duplicated and fragmented business processes, no end-to-end view of corporate operations and a limited capacity for data retention, recovery and backup. In summary, there’s poor operational efficiency, protocol management and quality data management.
Process improvement is used when business processes need to be updated frequently, involve the use of different software and are spread across multiple regions and business units. The benefits of optimizing your processes will allow your organization to:
- satisfy business, legal and compliance requirements;
- streamline costs and combat stalled profitability and growth;
- provide better control over processes and speed up workflow;
- deploy a solution that supports governance across multiple platforms and business units;
- clearly define roles to improve communication; and
- enhance collaboration for knowledge sharing.
It is not unusual for companies to have siloed processes and have different technologies over time as a result of a temporary solution that was never fully addressed, or even an organizational resistance to change. But, organizing outcomes and correcting processes reduces errors and mitigate risks, especially if there are any attempts to automate tasks. Having the ability to manage multiple processes at the same time with user-defined roles and event-driven decisions saves time and increases productivity.
Life sciences organizations that standardize processes will be able to quickly adapt leading industry practices. Across R&D, procurement, manufacturing and distribution, digital transformation will enable your organization to support future growth plans, have a greater understanding of client behavior, move products faster and improve the bottom line. Consider the value digital transformation will have for your organization in the long run.
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