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Cognos: CRM Not "Granular" Enough for Pharmaceutical Decision-Making
TMCnet Contributing Editor
Saying “CRM and ERP systems do not offer the right level of granularity to enable informed decision-making,” Bill Stevens, senior director of life sciences solutions at Cognos has announced the launch of two new Cognos products designed to help pharmaceutical companies “improve clinical trials management” and improve sample distribution across the sales force.
Clinical trials represent one of the biggest direct-spend components in most pharmaceutical R&D budgets. The new Cognos Clinical Trial Forecasting Blueprint is being billed as helping pharmaceutical companies “better anticipate clinical trial resource requirements and accompanying expenses in order to comply with FDA filing requirements.”
This past January Cognos announced a deal with Similarity Systems, vendor of business-focused data quality products, where the two companies would provide enterprise customers with a range of products for analyzing, managing, monitoring and improving the quality of data within the Cognos platforms.
Under the agreement, Similarity Systems and Cognos will enable Similarity Systems’ data quality metrics to be presented in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence. The two companies will also cooperate in joint marketing and sales initiatives.
Using the multi-dimensional modeling and integrated workflow of Cognos 8 BI and the new Performance Blueprint, the product is marketed as helping organizations more accurately forecast, plan and manage trial expenses, recognize and correct under-performing clinical trials, consolidate all trials to facilitate enterprise-wide visibility and analysis and drive greater accountability and control at each stage of the trial.
Another significant pain point for pharmaceutical companies is “the inability to determine the right mix of sample resources to allocate to their sales force in order to meet overall prescription volume growth targets,” Cognos officials think. Therefore the Cognos Sample Optimization Blueprint “enables pharmaceutical executives to develop and implement sample allocation plans that are in line with corporate revenue objectives.”
By providing an automated and consistent vehicle to solicit input from all stakeholders – including finance, sample administrators, brand managers, and operations managers – the Blueprint helps organizations build optimal sample distribution strategies that take into account current market conditions, field level information, inventory plans, and other corporate goals.
The search capabilities built into the latest version of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence earn the BI vendor a “unique place in the burgeoning crossroads of analytics and data search, but Cognos' rivals are likely to catch up if they haven't taken steps to do so already,” notes industry observer Ted Kemp.
The new capability, called Cognos Go! Search Service, “uses keywords to find content from within broad swathes of the Cognos BI environment, including data cubes and entire report content. Cognos Go! preindexes data points and uses that structure to return search results by relevance. It taps Cognos 8's metadata environment to bring context to results,” Kemp says.
Clinical Trial Forecasting and Sample Optimization are the first in a series of life sciences-specific solutions planned by Cognos.
David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.
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