Success story

An end-to-end solution for clinical trial forecasting and demand planning

By Timothy Kirby

Background

As a medical technology company, our client develops, manufactures, and sells medical devices across the pharmaceutical industry. Every day, this global organization interacts with clinical laboratories, healthcare institutions, researchers, and the general public, providing solutions aimed at elevating the wellbeing of their customers. 

Challenge

Within the life sciences sphere, connecting research and development to financial planning is often a time consuming challenge that involves many different functional areas across the organization. For our client, this disjointedness was creating challenges within the R&D financial accrual process. 

Previously, this planning was managed across countless spreadsheets with little to no standardization for forecasting patients, allocating resources, and financial spend. Imprecise planning and inconsistent data meant frequent retroactive financial adjustments, resulting in little to no transparency into company wide spending and expenses. 

Our client needed data-driven insights and flexibility to plan across their clinical demand and resource staffing processes. 

Solution

Combining industry expertise with in-depth knowledge of leading business technologies, Keyrus implemented a solution with Anaplan, a cloud-based connected planning tool that helps break down the data silos found within an organization. This platform enabled our client to synchronize financial action and readiness and establish a connected, standardized end-to-end planning solution. 

Our team had the privilege of working alongside the organization’s Global Clinical Development team to ensure our solution broke down barriers and addressed every aspect of our client’s pain points. Keyrus recognized the potential to leverage this platform’s patented technology to achieve a more sustainable and efficient R&D financial accrual process and establish more data transparency for the entire company. 

Through Anaplan, we consolidated actual and early concept trial management, including site and subject planning, and enabled users with the ability to use cost drivers to allocate expenses using actual and anticipated purchase orders. For complete visibility, we implemented a quarterly reporting process to view trial and program health, including budget status. These reports also allow the client to compare site and subject forecast to actuals, and track target milestone dates. 

For a truly end-to-end solution, early concept trial management is now connected to clinical demand and clinical trial forecasting. Users now have comprehensive control over their clinical demand and resource plan using driver-based inputs, and can easily compare financial forecast snapshots throughout time. These snapshots now consider resource availability and rack rates as a key forecasting component, facilitating the development of a well-built, bottom-up financial forecast.  

Results

With the implementation of Anaplan as of March 2021, our client’s business reporting is now capable of handling the complexities within the life sciences industry. The clinical trial data financial reporting is now synthesized across external data sources into a centralized clinical forecasting solution. 

This integrated Anaplan model improves company wide data access, allowing our client the needed clinical R&D demand visibility across all aspects of research and development, with the ability to see aggregated values for nine different business units. Establishing a standardized process pertaining to forecasting patients, allocating resources, and calculating monthly accruals for all clinical trials is projected to decrease financial forecasting error from over ten percent to single digit margins. 

Demand and resource planning is significantly eased with better tracking of labor and trial expenses under a single unified platform. Top-down visibility is further enhanced with real time capacity and utilization reporting for associates across the organization.

Through active client engagement and persistent attention to detail, we developed a best-in-class planning solution that is both flexible and user friendly. This solution empowers all employees, from project managers to executives, to easily make real time, data-driven decisions that result in a positive financial impact and increased organizational accuracy.