How to Win in a Competitive Pharma Market with a Best-in-class Competitive Intelligence (CI) Program

If you want to win in a competitive pharma market, you need a best-in-class competitive intelligence (CI) program which includes – tracking and analyzing information related to your competitors with the intent of empowering internal stakeholders to generate insights that can facilitate the decision-making.

To have a best-in class CI program, you need to have an efficient CI process – a process that can help you achieve the 3 most crucial goals:

1. 1. Stay focused on the information that is most important to the organization 
   2. Spend more time on generating insights 
   3. Share the insights and make them accessible within the organization 

In this blog post, we will explain what the challenges are and how a modern approach – a competitive intelligence platform, can help CI professionals to achieve these goals.

Challenges 

High volume of data: There’s more information available now than ever before across multiple sources and it keeps growing exponentially. For example, clinicaltrials.gov can provide 10,000+ clinical trials using the term – Breast Cancer.  

Diverse and disparate data: Pharma companies conduct both primary and secondary research to gain perspective on the current and future market.  

• Primary data would include – Key Intelligence Topics/ Key Intelligence Questions (KITs/KIQs) specific information 
• Secondary data could be broad – scientific/clinical, regulatory, commercial/sales, business related information. 

Solution: To bring all the relevant data together, AI and machine learning-enabled technology platforms can be leveraged. One of the most compelling, and beneficial applications of AI and machine learning-enabled technology platforms is automating the data collection and curation process. Thereby, providing CI professionals with aggregated data coming from multiple sources (including primary data) at the right time. 

Challenges 

Data cleaning and processing – The organization of data is a critical component of a CI process. As per the study published by CIPHER, competitive and market intelligence and insights professionals spend up to 75% of their time on activities like collecting and organizing information.  

Data visualization – Once the data is organized as a database in an excel spreadsheet, it has to be visualized to generate insights from it. But there are a couple of factors to consider as it relates to visualization. First, a visualization should provide a unified view of the data. Second, to visualize the data as per the needs of various user groups and their specific focus areas. 

Solution: Technologies like natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) offer incredible potential to support automated tagging and creating pre-built or customized visualizations so that CI professionals can spend significant time on developing insights rather than organizing and visualization the data. 

Challenges 

Limited collaboration: All the insights are good for nothing if they do not get delivered to the right stakeholder at the right time. One of the traditional ways of sharing insights is through emails with very few people which leads to gaining a limited perspective on the insights generated.  

Lack of a knowledge repository: All the insights and knowledge generated in the past will either remain siloed and under-utilized if it is not accessible to the stakeholders. The lack of a centralized knowledge management system can lead to replication of effort within the company and even the same department. 

Solution: CI tools offer a searchable knowledge repository that enables users to access a variety of data, information, and insights. In addition, these tools offer the ability to create, schedule and deliver information based on selected insights which can be shared internally and externally.

With the evolution of Covid-19, there’s no denying that having a competitive intelligence (CI) platform is the “New Normal”. Many organizations rely on multiple pre-built competitive intelligence platforms that cannot be customized for your business’ specific competitive and market intelligence needs and provide ‘point solutions’ and ‘siloed insights’.  

Before choosing which platform to invest in, you need to determine which solution can provide you with the ‘Single source of Truth’ in one single platform. 

At DataZymes we have experts that make the process easy, and it all starts with a simple conversation. Request a demo of DataZymes DZIntellia^TM to see how we can help you in setting up the best-in class CI process.

Market Intelligence & Competitive Intelligence Tools – The 2021 Buyer’s Guide. Cipher. https://www.cipher-sys.com/2020-buyers-guide-for-market-competitive-intelligence-software-tools. Accessed 8 Sept, 2021